jimmichia,
Red Hat will install almost flawlessly in most circumstances. Up to now, I have not ever had an issue with RHEL in conjunction with SATA HDDs or wireless cards, SO FAR!!
( I have installed RHEL on several laptops and utilized the wireless cards)
Please understand that Red Hat is a distribution that costs - not a free OS. If you are looking for the FREE version, check out
http://www.centos.org/. It is Red Hat's community (free) version.
Books are a little harder, as it all depends on the reader. Are you looking for a Red Hat book, or just a book on Linux, in general?
HTH