I'm a life-long windows user. Getting a degree in software development and starting to notice that my schooling is being mainly driven toward MS legacy programming. I would like to broaden my knowledge of other OS's starting with Linux. I am interested in Linux primarily because it is Unix-based and I would like to learn to develop PHP for Apache servers (because the ASP we're learning is useful, but mostly unsupported by server admins). Can anyone direct me to some worthwhile online documentation of Linux? Specifically something directed at a new user?

http://www.mandrake.com or http://www.redhat.com are good starting versions of Linux. You should be able to find mailing lists on each site where newbies are welcomed and encouraged to ask questions. I am still in the learning process myself and am starting to work with PHP (I do work in ASP at the moment at work).

can i be a complete and also irrelevant git...

"help! help! i'm being repressed"

assuming you're in ni world....

you might want a loook at a linux manual such as http://cakenet.dynu.com/redhat_unleashed.tar.bz2

Ok, I got the line wrong. After careful reviewing of the movie, you're right it is repressed, not oppressed .
[edit]
*ding* - all is right with the world
-isa
[/edit]

On another note, thanks for the links, I found them to be very informative. Now I just need to get over the fright of learning a completely new OS (I've never used anything that wasn't DOS based, I feel like an average user again ).

http://rute.sourceforge.net/ is supposed to be very good.

welcome aboard

to just learn php + apache+ mysql, you don't need to get linux yet
just put them to your windoze box first and start playing there.
check httpd.apache.org www.php.net www.mysql.com

if you start-off with linux it will take you a month or more before you 'll start looking at php scripting, but in any case go for it.
just not too many steps at the time.

good luck

After going over some of the links provided here, I spent the majority of the day yesterday working with Red Hat. I finally got it to recognize my fat32 drive (NTFS isn't supported) so I can transfer the files I download the that drive and copy them over to the ext3 drive. Thanks for the links, I'm starting to feel comfortable in Linux.

BTW, I'm now registered user #277,002!

btw, ntfs is supported on some distro's, the problem is that it is readonly .

Redhat don't enable ntfs in their default kernels (even as modules). For documentation and links to guides/manuals about linux have a look at the Linux Documentation Project.

Linux takes a little while to get the hang of.

get an offical redhat text, it will come in handy

aha, sorry, was not aware of that (use debian myself). Well, I guess if you only have read-only access, you might just as well have no access at all, considering you cannot really do too many usefull things on a read-only filesystem, except perhaps executable files, and those are stored on the ext2(3) filesystem in any case.