Well, I am 17 and been using PCs since I was little, so I know alot about DOS and how they work but anyways I know Windows quite well but I know that IT departments die for people who are experienced and educated in Linux so it's my goal to learn about how it works as much as possible.

So with that said, I heard that Slackware and Gentoo is the best distribution to choose if you are serious about learning the insides and out of Linux. So I'm wondering if there are any excellent guides or resources that will put me on the right track of installing this distro smoothly?

shilos thread right here will give you an excellent idea of what to expect....

the first start is most of the time the website of the distro which provides links to wiki, forums, irc channels, resources, etc.

This would be very helpful to you

regards

Slackware is a wonderful distribution to work with. I used Red Hat and SuSe distros for a long time, and loved learning some about Linux, but I've never had as much fun and learned so much as I have since I started using Slackware.

The official Slackware documentation is at http://www.slackbook.org/

again, good thinking to give Slackware a shot.
to repeat from somewhere i read and dont remember: when you install Distro X, you learn Distro X. when you install Slackware, you learn Linux.
(or something along those lines) and it is _very_ true.
good luck!

This is exactly why I cherish the Linux community, everyone is very helpful!

One more question, are the packages binary or source based?

packages in slackware are a little different than other distros.. and they have the .tgz extension, and are compressed archives basically.
check out this link, from the slackbook

you can use either, actually. i like to compile from source, then create the .tgz package with checkinstall. that way i can save it if i ever need to install it somewhere else, but the .tgz is easy, and the install itself uses the .tgz files. also, linuxpackages has almost every piece of software you could want for easy installation.

The base package manager is binary-based (although, it can be used to build from source a binary using the install.sh script -not a good idea, tho').

But it is basic enough as to allow some other package-magnament software to build on top of it. Check in my signature the EMERDE and PortPKG project links. They both build and install packages from source...

the only problem is that there aren't as many things to install as the binary packages around (check www.linuxpackages.net and www.slacky.it, and compare those repositories with the ones of Emerde and PortPKG...)

And one more, are burning all 4 of the ISO images really necessary?

nope...you only need one and two. the first contains the base install, and 2 contains kde, t and some extra stuff. you only need the first 2. the rest you can snag later from slackware.com packages if you want.

Here are the better Slackware-specific sources of information...

alt.os.linux.slackware newsgroup
alt.os.linux.slackware FAQ
Slackware-FAQ - LQWiki
The Revised Slackware Book Project
Slackware Linux Basics
SlackWiki

They're compiled binaries. However, "SlackBuild" scripts are provided for building those packages from source.

There are many sites that will help. If you browse this forum you will find most of them. You can even follow the links in my forum sig below.