I have been reading some interesting things about the
Advanced Player's Guide, which is already available
as a PDF download and apparently will be available
in game stores around this Friday. It seems that it
will fill in many gaps in the original race and class
line-ups, with a half-orc race (called "orc-blooded")
and variants of the gnome and halfling. New classes
(renamed to avoid conflict with future WotC versions)
include a barbarian, a bard, a druid, a monk, and an
illusionist. I am very curious to see how all of these
items as well as other variant rules in that book came
out -- I can certainly see much of it being very useful
to us.