Hi all. I'm an MCSE and have been involved in Microsoft products for a long time. I am currently a network administrator for a small company and am looking forward to learning Linux to help me with this company as well as future companies I work for.

I have installed Linux on a couple machines at home but am installing one at work now to better understand it and to try and get past using the GUI controls so much.

I would be grateful if anyone could recommend a good Linux book to get started. Something that uses the GUI heavily at first but gets into some commands as well would be great. I have installed Mandrake 9.1 as a distro at work if that matters at all in the selection of the book.

Thanks to all!

it seems to me that most of the best documentation is on the web. try the Linux Cookbook, Linux Documentation Project, the O'Reilly site, and Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition for starters. depending on what distro you're going to use, you can find good documentation at those sites, too (e.g., Red Hat, Slackware, etc.) if you want to buy a book, you can choose to buy Rute, or O'Reilly's Running Linux 4th Edition is also good (or so i hear -- i have a used copy of the 3rd edition and it is really good, but 4th has more info on the GUI stuff i believe so might suit you better). gl

MCSE...
Never heard of it.

But in the end, don't rely to much on the GUIs.
If you want to be efficient, you will have to use the power of the command line.

For now, let there be links.

Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition
http://rute.sourceforge.net/

Mandrake 9.1 Documentation
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/fdoc.php3

Linux Commands - Linux in a Nutshell
http://www.onlamp.com/linux/cmd/

O'Reilly & Associates
http://www.oreilly.com/

Open Books Project - O'Reilly & Associates
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/