I think I looked everywhere that I could to find people's recommendation on Linux books. I found little to no information, and me... I like knowing what I'm getting into before I go tearing into an Operating System. Anyone have any good recommendations out there?

I'll be using the Mandriva flavor of Linux. Just sounds tastey.

Hi, and welcome to linuxquestions

Try this for some reviews:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...cat.php/cat/17

Also be aware that you can find alot of good docs online. Actually I prefer The Linux Documentation Project
Check it out here...It's free
http://www.tldp.org/

And picking Mandriva for a start is very good. It has a little bit of it all. Alot of GUI and still the advanced features.

Have fun

Regards,
Jorgen

if you are looking to do everyday tasks via the command line i reccoment the Linux cookbook 2nd edition. It covers playing mp3's from the command line, ripping music, editing files via nano and thing slike that. How to convert a batch of jpg images to png. Some command line email clients and things.

Linux in a Nutshell--O'Reilly

RUTE is another good book.

Thanks all. Defintiely got what I wanted. Right now I am using the Linux Doc Project, and I have a hand-me-down of Unix in a Nutshell. Awesome stuff so far. Yeah, I want to go command line... I wanna stay command line, but I was told sticking to a gui first, and using the console in the OS is the best way to learn. That way if I make a minor mistake and need to exit, all I do is close out of console.

Thanks again all.

PS - One last thing, I've been speaking to my Linux/Networking instructor and he pointed me to a lot of Red Hat documentation. I trust his judgement since he taught me a lot in the past, but what do you guys think about the Red Hat Bible? Worth investing in?

Good book if you're using Red Hat or Fedora Core or even an RPM based distro. I would suggest reading non-distro specific books or books that cover a few different distros so you can get a feel for different distros. Even if you choose to start with Mandriva, you may find you like a different distro more.

You're absolutely right. I changed to the Ubuntu distro, but Im having such a hard time imaging the ISO. I don't know where or how to start. Anyways, thanks on the book info, I went with the Online Tutorials that Anti.corp suggested. Good stuff that is definitely Instruction Booklet worthy.

Thanks again, all. Definitely helpin a new(B) out.

One great thing about Ubuntu, is the community. You can check out their forums here and the Ubuntu forum here on LQ.