Reddit mentions of A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (2nd Edition)

I can never say enough good things about this linux book:
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

Well this reddit is mostly about Linux news not help. The forums and irc are where that belongs.

As for books I would suggest getting one that deals heavily in the command line. Much quicker and easier than a gui and it changes slower.

This http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Commands-Editors-Programming/dp/0131367366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311976268&sr=8-1 got good reviews on amazon but really for bash any book on Linux or unix shell scripting will do fine. (I for example used a unix book from the late 80's to learn how to use bash)

As for one on the guy I would just take whatever one They have at your local barnes and noble, just make sure it's recent

I found this to be a really well-written, comprehensive guide.

> A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, by Mark Sobell

It teaches you everything you need to know about scripting from the terminal in Linux and Mac, and highlighting the differences between them. Since CLI hasn't changed too much in the past 20 years, it's safe to assume this book won't be obsolete anytime soon.

Sobell makes this modular for easy reference-work, yet still perfectly readable from cover-to-cover. I'm still learning new things from it!

I'm currently learning how to use Linux (Ubuntu) from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Commands-Editors-Programming/dp/0131367366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311105692&sr=8-1. The explanations are very thorough and cover pretty much everything you possibly need to know.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Commands-Editors-Programming/dp/0131367366/ref=pd_sim_b5
I learned mostly from this book. Starts you out step by step, lots of hand holding for learning the shell. Has a good reference for most commands too. Not so much for programming as the basic shell i guess but still a good one.

These books, third one optional are a great start to be a freedomm-beard / community troll like myself. I can't say its a glorious life but it pays the bills. Being able to throw together a cluster of computers for some interesting distributed database / model crunching is pretty damn cool. I would also suggest a copy of virtualbox and ubuntu for a beginner's linux desktop and debian for servers. Freebsd is pretty dame great, and cent/rhel is not a bad place to go either. Its also unix with a U not eunuch with an e.

http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Administration-Handbook-Evi-Nemeth/dp/0130084662
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Commands-Editors-Programming/dp/0131367366/ref=pd_sim_b_2
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Vim-Editors-Arnold-Robbins/dp/059652983X/ref=pd_sim_b_23

I understand this is not so much a scientist bit of content here, but having systems competency if you plan on doing research that does any model analysis is pretty valuable.