glibc/gcc/binutils

I had some trouble locating a good upgrade doc for these three beasts.
Linuxdoc has some nice writeups on installing these utilities from
scratch, but I already have working compilers and libraries. Hopefully
someone with prior experience can help. I am asking before leaping this
time because I really dorked my system up the last time I tried this.

First I am not worried about RPM dependencies, I don't use them.

GlibC looks pretty straight forward. Just download the tarball, unpack
and install. What I am wondering is should I try a test install before
ripping out the current libraries, or is this pretty straightforward? Or
does the new binary just replace parts of the library?

Do I have to upgrade GCC one step at a time. I am currently using
2.91.66. The upgrade path seems to only be able to use the previous
released version of gcc. Hopefully I can just download the 3.0.4
tarball, unpack it and install.

binutils I haven't read much on yet. I spent last night reading and
downloading the GlibC and GCC tarballs. I have heard that when updating
GlibC that GCC and binutils get updated also.

Craig S.