I agree that once you get past the basics experience and how-to knowledge are the best for you generally, but nothing beats a good tutorial to give you the low-level knowledge that everybody needs to learn. I recently went through the (sadly outdated and incomplete, but still very informative)
Debian Tutorial and came away with a much better understanding of basic command line stuff and especially file permissions, which can be quite confusing for newbies to figure out.
I'm going to check out the Rute manual next. It looks good.
