Decent n00b book for "nix

I'm looking for a decent book that will explain things to me as I'm totally new to this as everytime I get past one roadblock I hit another. Konsole mode sucks for me though it's similar to the way DOS worked but it's really frustrating the :crap out of me. Searching with google is fine but when one doesn't know what to search for, well you get my drift . Are the 'Dummy' books any good? I'm currently running Kubuntu 7.04 Thanks for any response.

 

I have nothing to offer except that I'd like to ask the same question!
Need education!

Oh, yes = I think that Canonical will send you literature, but am not sure just what, when, and at what cost........http://www.canonical.com/

 

I am looking at moving the Penguin back onto a couple of my computers. I bought 'Moving to Linux' by Marcel Gagne a year or so ago, kinda helpfull, but not a full tutorial on Linux.

My advice would be to dual boot Linux on a computer, use it and that will narrow your search when you have a problem. I googled Linux tutorials and found some pretty good sites. There are just so many versions of Linux. I guess that is good and bad.

Looks like I will be working a lot more with the Linux in the near future.

E

 

Ya I know, but I'd like a book as I'm in front of the screen for a good part of the day and need something different.

 

Tough question due to the nature of Linux... every distro is going to be new learning curve.

You can likely get a guide on shell commands (which again, depends on the shell you choose to use), and that would be a decent start to at least command line mastery, and that would be most transferrable across distros. However, you seem to know a bit about this already?? :confused

Personally, most *nix knowledge I have comes from this book:



This got me familiarized with shell commands, scripting, some higher-level programming, and setting up an X server (its fairly old, most distros have that setup by default).

It's helped me with my Sabayon box, for sure.

 

On line books:
a ) lightweight to get your feet wet without overwhelming you
http://lowfatlinux.com/
http://www.linuxhelp.net/newbies/
b) http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
note the download pdf link doesn't work and the download html link will get you a tar.bz2 file which you'd need to untar in linux so you might do better reading the pages on line.

 

I can see that. :cry I decided to get a 'Dummies' book which has a Fedora disk included and is cheap, also has a %95 rating on Amazon. I hope that with a 'matched pair', I hope I can learn the basics easily enough without hitting individual distro idiosyncrasies.

@plodr Thanks for the links, looks like just what I need for online learning.

EDIT: Ooh, look at that! My 2000th post and it's on Linux!

 

I just saw there's also a Dummies book for Ubuntu, I think I'll get this instead of the Fedora one.:cool

 

I'd highly suggest the "Linux for Dummies" for you. I bought the 7th edition and it came with a dvd that had several distros on it. It contained the full versions of Fedora Core and Knoppix and ISO images of Linspire, SUSE, Xandros and Mandriva.

 

It's maybe not the answer you're looking for, but the only real way to learn Linux is by using it. I remember when I first started using it, that it was very annoying that I couldn't do the simplest things - especially as a qualified (Micro$oft) PC technician.

It does get easier, and it's best to try as many different 'distros' as you can, both to find one which suits you, and to gain knowledge, because most things you learn will be transferable to a different version of Linux. Stay away fromthe source based ones like Gentoo, Arch, because you'll have enough headaches already without the hassle/time spent compiling

Ones to consider that are more user friendly than others....

PClinuxOS
Pardus
Parsix
Wolvix
Zenwalk
Mepis
Puppy (tiny, but very logical help and setup routines, that a lot of distros could learn from)

I've omitted the *buntu family, because I just don't rate it, but that's a personal choice, and lots do like it (for some reason)

I had an amusing slanging match with a *buntu fanboi on another site. He seemed to think the thousands of messages in the forums proved it was a good 'distro'. To me, it just proves *lots* of people are having problems with the over hyped Ubunu/Kubuntu/EverythingElseBuntu

 

Look at all these linux books in my home folder

need any???????????