What's the best book for beginners to learn Linux?
A Book on Linux
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: A Book on Linux
#2I have found that How Linux Works, 3rd Edition from No Starch Press is a pretty good book talking about linux for beginners.
Re: A Book on Linux
#3Start here: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Re: A Book on Linux
#4In the long run, I've learned the most important things from just using Linux, but I used books when starting and occasionally now.
For me, it was Linux in a Nutshell (942 pages in the current edition) because I wanted a reference made of paper instead of pixels.
Later for deep background, Design of the Linux Operating System https://archive.org/details/DesignUNIXOperatingSystem but I picked up an used print copy for Those were the best books for me. You are not me. Good luck.
Re: A Book on Linux
#5Thank you for your recommendations! You’ve been very helpful.
Re: A Book on Linux
#6Depends on if you mean Linux internals, or working with Linux in general. In the case of the latter, I really liked "Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook". It's a monster sitting at just under 1200 pages (for the fifth edition) and covers a bit of everything from a user of a Unix OS's perspective. The way the chapters are broken out, you can pick and choose what you care about.
The modern editions of this book are primarily focused on Linux with some side notes for the BSDs.
Re: A Book on Linux
#7Unix Power Tools
The Linux kernel doesn't matter. What matters is understanding the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment.
You needn't become a religious zealot committed to the unix philosophy, but if you don't take the time to understand it, you'll never get the most out of the environment.
Re: A Book on Linux
#8Linux From Scratch [1] calls itself a collection of book.
Re: A Book on Linux
#9Unix Power Tools The Linux kernel doesn't matter. What matters is understanding the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment. You needn't become a religious zealot committed to the unix philosophy, but if you don't take the time to understand it, you'll never get the most out of the environment.
Similar but more historical, The Unix Programming Environment is a fun read, I learned a lot from it, and it's nice to have some historical context.
Re: A Book on Linux
#10The trouble is that things change too quickly for there to be a specific tome that everyone agrees is gospel. I think the closest you will get to gospel in this space are classic books like K&R C, which have very little to do with Linux per se.
Also, a "book on linux" is going to look very different if it's based on Debian as opposed to e.g. NixOS. Linux distros come in all shapes and sizes and no matter what level you're operating on (just using the GUI, light sysadmin, deep systems programming, down to kernel hacking), they may appear as totally different paradigms.
I would recommend simply daily driving Linux. If you're still using another operating system, ween yourself off of that. Additionally, there are a bunch of obvious projects that are low hanging fruit for just getting to grips with Linux. Want a personal website? Spin up a VPS or a cheap laptop and build it from scratch. Set up your own personal email. Get certbot running. Write a simple server in C that can do request/response of TCP. Write an i2c driver for some random micro you have lying around. Whatever you are interested in making/doing, just go do it.
Resist the urge to google everything. `man` has more information than you think it does.