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

• "The Practice of Systems and Network Administration" by Thomas Limoncelli, Christina Hogan, and Strata Chalup
  
  
• "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas Limoncelli
  
  
• "Getting Things Done" by David Allen
  
  
• "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, and Ben Whaley
  
  
• "Essential System Administration" by Æleen Frisch
  
  Even more formatting fun!
  
  By the way, thank you for this list.

Download Virtual Box.
Download a few Linux Distros - Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. Ubuntu is rather user friendly. Get the server version, not desktop. (Or get both, but you want experience with the command line, and the server version will force you to work with the command line.)

O'reilley books are great. Very dry, but reliable sources of info. Go "used" for now, as they can get expensive when you buy too many.

Learning the Unix OS is a good intro.

Also, this book is a large overview of linux sysadmin: Essential System Administration by Frisch

A Bash book would help, as well.

Oh, and the "man" command. On the command line, run "man anycommand" to bring up manual pages on any command. You can run "man man" or "man bash" to get started.

Best of luck!

Edit: typo

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-System-Administration-Third-Frisch/dp/0596003439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269300892&sr=8-1

Essential System Administration - Good for any BSD; a classic

I say this all the time, but: Who would have thought that in the 2012, the greatest OS war of our day would still be BSD vs SystemV (iOS vs. Android)?

Generally, a focus in Windows is going to take you into corporate IT, building internally-oriented tools to support organizations. Here you'll want to learn bout VMWare, the full Microsoft stack, and look closely at tools designed for Enterprise support. There's less demand in this arena for nix, but also less chance to make a real impact on the world. Sure, there's something to be said for helping maintain the compute clusters inside of banks, or using Altiris or similar tools to manage hundreds of desktops for gigantic offices. I've done this myself, but I didn't have very much fun.

For my money, where you want to be is in web operations, building the systems that drive popular websites. Think about Instagram, Etsy, Netflix, companies that move enormous amounts of data around on the cheap, with relatively tiny staff. Read the blogs by the infrastructure team behind Etsy, and you'll realize quickly that these guys are geniuses.

Here you'll want to learn about how to interact programmatically with cloud compute providers, such as Amazon AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and the OpenStack providers that are starting to pop up, like HP. (A cloud provider is generally not just virtualization, but virtualization coupled with an API. It may sound small but it's a big difference!)

Here's some reading: If you want to learn a lot about nix operating systems, check out The Armadillo Book and The Practice of System and Network Administration.

If you're interested in learning web operations-oriented sysadmin, which is a VERY interesting place to be, also check out The Art of Scalability -- well, the first 2/3 anyway -- and the followup book, 50 Scalability Rules.

And especially, especially read and understand this, because there won't be many web-oriented companies still in business by 2014 that don't follow this process: Continuous Delivery.

Good luck! You picked a GREAT time to get started in the industry. The 00's were pretty boring by comparison. :)

EDIT: I KAN SPEEL

You could probably do a lot worse than A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine by Mark Burgess (author of CFEngine and several system administration textbooks) and Aeleen Frisch (author of O'Reilly's Essential System Administration).

It's part of the USENIX short topics booklets. It's relatively short, cheap, and useful.

My Guru made me buy the following books. I scoffed at him, "I can get everything on the internet." But they've been invaluable in my learning how to do various things on the system:

• Essential System Administration, 3rd edition (I only have the 2nd edition, time to upgrade!!)
  
  
• Unix In a Nutshell

If you're interested in learning, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Essential System Administration from O'Reilly: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-System-Administration-Third-Frisch/dp/0596003439

It's a bit dated, but very much relevant. Definitely worth a read.