Decent linux Book?

[Aeria]

I'm looking to buy a book about Linux that teaches:

Use of the command line
Parts of the OS
How the OS works
etc.

I've installed Debian but thats about it.
I want to get up to speed fast.

Can anyone recommend something?

[ikonia]

its very hard to actually learn "linux" more so "fast" as experience is the thing that brings everything togther. Linux is basiclly the Linux kernel intergrated with a load of gnu tools, what you want to do I believe is learn about how to use Linux distributions

I suggest you pick a mainstream distro, and an accompanying book, there are many out there for debian, ubuntu, Fedora, Redhat, Centos and suse and use the book to acomplish things and learn.

Do some video encoding, and when it breaks and becomes a bit hard, don't give in, learn to fix it
do some audio recording and when it breaks or doesn't work how you want, learn to configure and fix it.
Print some documents out in different format (see above ending)
Start using it as your general office solution, and when you can't do what you want and have to hack around with open office to make it work.......see above again.

You'll get more out of that and also learn how things hang together, how things are packaged.

then once you feel confident, pick another distro and try again, most of it will be easy but then you'll start picking up different little tweaks between the distros.

There is no short cut to "learning it" its all down to how much you use it, how hard you try and how involved you get. Experience is the key

[peterb]

I found "Linux in a Nutshell" (published by O'Reilly to be an excellent generic command line guide. It is a guide though and just gives the command line options. A cut down version is "The Linux Pocket Guide" also published by O'Reilly, but much less comprehensive.

"linux in a Nutshell" also gives a good chapter on the boot process, and an intro to Vi (a command line text ediotor). Highly recommended, but as Ikonia says, you really need a specific distro book as well to identify the peculiarities of your distro. And (again to echo Ikonia)it is when things don't work straight off that you really learn. You rarely (if ever) need to totally reload the OS. As the linux philosophy is a central kernel supported by lots of applications that do just one or two tasks, but do them really well, the most you might ever have to reload is an application. The other beauty of linux is that there is no complicated registry, most functions/applications are handled by scripts - which are human readable. No incomprehensible registry keys! The difficulty (at the start) is finding where they are, or where the configuration files are located, and understanding the layout of the filesystem. There is logic to it, but it takes a while for the logic to click into place.

Finally, don't forget the built in documentation. Typing man command or info command will bring up lots of information. The man pages vary in depth though. But they are there - in your system.

Good luck - I started teaching myself Linux about 3 years ago - it has been great fun, and I now use linux for my mainstream computing.

[0iD]

The 'In a Nutshell' book is handy for reference, but there is an absolute abundance of info with any distro you choose & scads of online support. Seek out your local LUG (linux user group), not just a bunch of cardy wearing beardy real ale drinkers but in my experiance, jolly helpful people.

[Phil_P]

its very hard to actually learn "linux" more so "fast" as experience is the thing that brings everything togther. Linux is basiclly the Linux kernel intergrated with a load of gnu tools, what you want to do I believe is learn about how to use Linux distributions

I suggest you pick a mainstream distro, and an accompanying book, there are many out there for debian, ubuntu, Fedora, Redhat, Centos and suse and use the book to acomplish things and learn.

Do some video encoding, and when it breaks and becomes a bit hard, don't give in, learn to fix it
do some audio recording and when it breaks or doesn't work how you want, learn to configure and fix it.
Print some documents out in different format (see above ending)
Start using it as your general office solution, and when you can't do what you want and have to hack around with open office to make it work.......see above again.

You'll get more out of that and also learn how things hang together, how things are packaged.

then once you feel confident, pick another distro and try again, most of it will be easy but then you'll start picking up different little tweaks between the distros.

There is no short cut to "learning it" its all down to how much you use it, how hard you try and how involved you get. Experience is the key

^^ Agreed 100% - there are no fast fixes.

The first month drives you mad - it takes you 3 hours to do a task that takes 3 minutes in Windows.
The second month you feel like you're making progress, but it's slow going.
After three months you find yourself thinking, wow - that's neat.
After six months, if you've stuck at it, it should start making real sense.

Learning Linux is like learning a foreign language. You start off still thinking in "Windows" and after a certain amount of time, about 6 months for me, you suddenly find yourself thinking in Linux. You first notice it when you're using Windows and go to do something the Linux way. At that point I guarantee you'll never go back.

You have to force yourself to use Linux on a daily basis. Set yourself realistic goals in realistic time frames - you may have 10 years of accumulated knowledge learning Windows, but as of now that all means diddly, and it's totally unrealistic to expect to reach the same level of proficiency in a few months.

I've been using UNIX/Linux for 12 years now and still learn something new every day.

As to your actual question - I really like the Linux Bible series of books (Wiley) - I have the Red Hat version by Christopher Negus and it's excellent. Maybe check out the debian version.

Good luck

[peterb]

Just as an aside (and all Phil_P says is quite correct - getting out of the windows mentality is hard!) a trip to a large Waterstones/Borders (if you have one near you) is worthwhile for a browse., as is a look at the book reviews on Amazon. I had forgotten that the first Red Hat book I bought was the one by Christopher Negus, and it got me through the first few months learniing curve - "In a nutshell" is more generic and focuses on CLI commands.

Other books I have bought (you don't need them yet though - or need them at all, except that they give ideas) are "The Linux Cookbook" and "Linux Multimedia Hacks" although in the fairly fast moving world of Linux distros, the last one is a bit dated.

[aidanjt]

Honestly, the best 'book' you can get for Linux is the internet. There's so many different components that make up a Linux desktop that it isn't feasibly possible to explain everything in one book (or even a volume).

Here's a good starting point, you can work from here, upwards to get a feel for how Linux is stitched together:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...oot/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Startup_Process

[lippy]

I have "Running Linux" by O'Reilly. It's not bad for starting, but TBH, once you've read it once through, I find its pretty useless as a reference.

IMHO, the best way to learn linux is to grab a distribution (I would recommend Ubuntu), install it on a separate drive (bought with the money you saved on a book) and start googling when you run into trouble! ( ubuntuguide.org is great)

Only once you've got the basics of Gnome/KDE (the main GUI's of linux) through trial and error / googling I would recommend either a book on the BASH shell, or the many tutorials on the internet, because that's where the real power of linux lies. Also, at this point disable Windows so that it takes effort to get into. (e.g. i unplugged the windows hard-drive). This is good, because it forces you to use linux, but without uninstalling it (not recommended if you play games though...)

After a few months of using it, I think you'll be v. happy with it (apart from games ... but even that's slowly changing)

Also, I disagree to an extent with Phil_P, the 1st month is filled with as much frustration as with delight. There's nothing cooler than figuring out how to use apt-get the 1st time, and installing masses of programs with a single line in the terminal, just because you can No more Next button!!!!

[peterb]

Since you already have debian installed (and it is a good mainstream distro) you are just as well sticking with that!

[alexkoon]

As everyone else has said - nothing beats doing it. Best to just try and use it and find out through experience. Also depends what you use it for, I use it predominantly for server side services, so I learnt by installing the service (such as Samba, Apache, MySQL) and configuring it to how I want it to run. I have started to use it more and more and have bolted on desktops, moving from KDE, to Gnome, back to KDE, then to fluxbox and now I use OpenBox.

Debian is great - I started off on Debian and have used it for years. Lately I have required newer packages than what debian provides and have started compiling my own packages and rolling my own kernel. This has brought me on the Gentoo distro.

So just use it and be prepared for some pain - also handy to have a second machine/laptop so you can google issues when you don't have a network connection or the networking is broken.

Once you are more comfortable, you realise there is so much more you can do - such as breaking out of corporate firewalls using their HTTP proxy back to your linux box at home, tunneling out so you can use banned chat software, surf to websites which they block etc etc. Hosting your own website, mail server etc etc - and not having to worry about Windows licensing and Zero day patch fixes!. Be aware though that linux apps do have bugs and some stuff can be broken (but Debian stable is VERY stable but with much older versions of software).

[Dorza]

Check out the bit-tech "Linux CLI 101" article which posted last week as it happens. I found it to be a rather nice little introduction to the command line.

I will hold my hand up and say I am a linux n00b so my advice is limited. However on my recent emigration to linux I have found it is vital that you learn how to use the command line and the file structure of linux and or the file structure of your distro. If you develop an understanding of those you should build yourself a good foundation to progress onto other things.

I would also try your hand at an array of skills. For example networking....if you ordinarily wouldn't need to network your pc to another one do it anyway so that you familiarise your self with the procedures needed to do it, you might pick up other skills along the way. In my example you might pick up the basic skills of configuring your system security through ip tables.

As far as a book is concerned I would say that there is enough information on the net to not need one. However, a book does provide a nicely ordered array of topics which are convenient to use and simple to find (if its in there!). In my experience with linux the net isn't always like that, particularly when your not sure what is your actually searching for.

[directhex]

it's very much out of date, but i wrote a reasonable introduction to building a debian linux desktop from a base system. some of it still applies (much of it's automagic these days though)

[aidanjt]

However on my recent emigration to linux I have found it is vital that you learn how to use the command line and the file structure of linux and or the file structure of your distro. If you develop an understanding of those you should build yourself a good foundation to progress onto other things.

I completely agree with this. The most important thing to remember about Linux (or UNIX in general), is that practically everything is treated as a file. So it's vital to gain an insite to the HFS structure, see http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html for more on that.

[aidanjt]

it's very much out of date, but i wrote a reasonable introduction to building a debian linux desktop from a base system. some of it still applies (much of it's automagic these days though)

It would probably still be worth a read, just because most distros do most of the installation legwork for you these days, it doesn't mean the knowledge you'd gain from doing so yourself isn't useful.

[RedStone]

The Linux Documentation Project. (tldp.org)

Chock full of quality How-To's, guides, man pages and FAQs, all for free. I definitely suggest checking out this website before looking to the bookshops.

[godsdog]

I was gobsmacked at what our local library had to offer. Linux / Photoshop / Programming / Windows in that order, which surprised me.