trailblazer,

There is all kind of info on the web that you can get (but don't trust everything 100%, even presumably legit sites).

Starting from the very basic, unless you can narrow down your area of interest. Google using a few key words, e.g. "gold recovery/extraction, etc...",  select wikipedia (usually has a good reputation), which would give you a starting point, and go on from there, doing deeper drill-down.

A short answer: Depending on the form of gold occurrance, the process could be very simple or terribly complicated, e.g. panning for alluvial gold... to leaching using cyanide. The web is a gold mine for information, especially general stuff.

GH