Hi All,

Myself Lalit Mohan from Delhi,having 10+ years experience in IT/Cloud.As far as Linux is concern I have a very basic knowledge about linux.Many time tried but couldn't be the regular to it.From your experience please suggest how to start and keep going to learn linux.

There are a bunch of ways to learn Linux and gain a good grasp of it, but the best ways are ones where you do lots of hands-on work. I recommend the books below, they are great reads and will teach you a lot about the OS, about command line, and shell scripting for more advance stuff.

Also The Linux Foundation has a free training/certification course at Edx.org called LFS101x that is a great intro to linux and will make you do hands on work too. Its at your own pace and its free!

Good luck!

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Using-Ne...+through+linux

http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Command-...hell+scripting

http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Shell-Pro...rds=Unix+shell

Welcome to LQ!

Describe some of your daily responsibilities during this tenure of IT/Cloud 'experience'.
Thank you.

It starts by downloading a linux distribution, installing it, and then using it. The more you use linux, the more you'll get out of it. There are many tutorials online and on youtube to learn the basics and just practice what you read and se.

Welcome aboard.

Just by using it you will improve.

How you learn, what you learn, and how quickly you learn are partly your native IQ and previous experience (which you cannot change now) but more significantly your use case. In other words, how do you use linux and what will you NEED to use it for going forward? (short term, no one expects you to predict the future)

One MAJOR factor is this: is your major use client, or server. If you are using a laptop or desktop machine and X-Windows most of the time, you are encountering user space factors only for that time. If you manage servers, and mostly in the shell/command line, then you are more likely to encounter more system administration work and aquire that (arguably deeper) knowledge.

There are excellent books published by O'Reilly Media (http://www.oreilly.com) that start with introduction and proceed through individual skills.

If you're going to be working with Linux systems there are basics that you need to know; primarily shell programming and the essential utilities (editors, useful commands). Those would be discussed in introduction publications although shell programming all by itself is one of the most useful things you'll ever learn (you can do massive amounts of useful work with shell programs).

If you're a software developer, depending upon what type of software you're working on, publications specific to what you're doing are quite useful. Those might include C/C++ programming, perhaps Java and a few others, all depending upon what you're doing.

Read reviews and descriptions of books that you think might be useful. O'Reilly provides descriptive material, Amazon provides reviews that are worth your time to read.

I'm suggesting books (not of the Blah for Dummies variety) that you'll put on your shelf and refer to now and again as time goes on (I've been doing this for over forty years and I still refer to books I've bought over the years when I can't quite remember how to do something).

The hard part is figuring out where to start but that is up to you; look for introductory titles, read the descriptions, read reviews if you can find them, don't bother with a bunch of introductory books, they're all pretty much the same, just pick one or two that interest you (then read them!).

Hope this helps some.

Hello Lalit,

I can suggest what I did around 9 years ago in 2006. I had enrolled myself into a RHCE course, and took classes for around 3 weeks. I didn't completed the course from them, as I was not satisfied by their teaching way as they wanted me to cram things than understand.

But the three books (which are from RedHat) are very very useful. I made sure, I completed each and every chapter and the exercises (which are at the end) carefully. This had really helped me a lot.

To practice, I strongly recommend installing any virtualisation software (like VMware, Parallels Desktop, Virtualbox) and install Linux on it. This would help you if in case you break anything and want to install again.

Lastly, once I had a fair grasp on Linux basics (yes, RHCE is basics) I used to read question and answers of various threads which gives you various real life problems and solutions.

Hope this helps.

Essential System Administration: Tools and Techniques for Linux and Unix Administration, 3rd Edition

Every Linux subject of the book I've collected/read/studied and lost...every one of them...
the first 5 or 6 chapters always covered 'the basics'. tronayne nailed it.

Old books, new books.
The basics haven't changed, all that much.

If you're interested in C programming (and why not: it's the basis of the system), you will want a copy of Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language (2nd ed.). Dennis was the guy that invented C (and many of the basic utilities in Unix that have been ported to Linux) and is the guy that wrote many of the manual pages for Unix systems. Those manual pages, by the way, used to be a page, not a novel as too many of them have become.

Another essential C book, in my opinion, is just about as old as The C Programming Languag: Stephen G. Kochan and Patrick H. Woood, Topics in C Programming (rev. ed.). Clearly written, full of useful examples covering pretty much all the the standard Library (about the only thing not included are inter process communications (IPC)).

AWK is an extremely powerful yet simple programming language, you'll want Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language; get it? A.W.K.

You will want a text about shell programming. I happen to use KornShell: Morris I. Bolsky, David G. Korn, The KornShell Command and Programming Language. The other principle shells, Bourne Shell, BASH, C-Shell (with the exception of C-Sheel which I would avoid) are similar in many ways -- shell programs written in Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) run just fine in BASH and KornShell (not so in C-Shell). Typically, because BASH is, for all practical purposes, KornShell many programs written for one will execute properly in the other).

One comment, a lesson leaned in a wasted youth: avoid vendor extensions (They Will Come Back and Bite You). GAWK, the GNU implementation of AWK includes extensions that will not work in "real" AWK. BASH is full of extensions that will not work in KornShell.

I recommend the above for the simple reason that they're lean, most of the above books are about 200 pages and fully cover the subject. All of the above include working example of useable programs, understandable examples that will help you learn and give you some ideas about how to create your own programs and utilities as you go on.

Then there is the problem of the basics. You need to learn the editors, you need to learn the basic utilities, you need to lean about pipes and filters. I'm talking about stuff like find, ls, ps and other basic utilities here that are used both in shell programs and individually to do work. I hate to admit that I don't know of a good publication that gives you a guide to using Linux command and utilities -- they must be one or two, but I don't of any.

Hope this helps some.

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