Reading material to get a quick guide on Linux

[sup3rcarrx7]

Hey guys. I'm interested in getting a head start for a Linux course I'm going to take in the summer. But i'd like to get a head start and see if I can get some reading material so I don't fall behind in the beginning of the class etc. Any recommendations? I've heard that the class covers distros including Suse and some redhat and how to maintain/trouble linux on the networking side of things. Any reading material related those those topics would be great. Thanks!

 

[larryBird44]

My company is sort of in a similar situation. We have a new product that runs on (Red Hat) LAMP setup and the last time I touched linux was over 10 years ago. The thing with linux is that the community is very "experiment and do it yourself to learn", but saying that, there are a ton of guides for the do-it-yourself personality.

I did a quick google search for "linux for newbies" and it brought up justlinux.com which looks promising. Pop on over to the Linux subforum you might get a better response.

 

[mdmcaf]

I learned Linux by using it. I've been using it for years and only started using books when I wanted to start doing more advanced stuff. My favorite books so far are the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook and Unix in a Nutshell. They're not necessarily the kinds of books that you read cover to cover but they're good reference for getting an idea of the kinds of things that you can do with the operating system. But I'm a kinaesthetic learner...so I learn best by doing it. You might be different.

I highly recommend O'Reilly books - they seem to be the best out there. Do a search on Amazon and you'll find tons of books of theirs and usually the reviews can give you a good idea of whether or not the book is for advanced users or for new users.

 

[nOrVow]

If you have any access to curriculum or course outlines I'd find a forum for your respective distro and read/practice their documentation for those outlines. Both SUSE and Redhat are RPM distros so it shouldn't be hard to transition between the two. SUSE uses YaST which is just a graphical front end for administering, but as far as things like partitioning/mounting, filesystems, file hierarchy, file permissions, backup/restoring, /etc configs, and basic CLI commands and flags are the same across almost all distros. For server related tasks, they're both similar for the most part as well with a few red hat exceptions.

http://www.amazon.com/LPIC-1-Linux-...cation/dp/0470404833/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
http://www.amazon.com/LPIC-2-Linux-...cation/dp/1118000153/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Fedora-Enterprise-Linux/dp/0132757273/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
http://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-C...5654/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321887786&sr=8-1

Note that these are certification text books, but they also make good reference guides as well. I'm actually using these (plus others) to study for a few Linux certs myself.

If you learn redhat, you pretty much learn 90% of suse since the only substantial difference between most distros are it's package management, and philosophy. Since SLES and RHEL are server distros - philosophy won't matter much at all.

If you want an all in one reference guide to Linux CLI/Shell scripting, etc. This is all you need.

Hope this helps.