Linux Mint Forums

I'm quite new to linux (i've ran ubuntu 9.10 to 10.10) for a while but never really done much other than a bit of office work, surfing the net, played the odd game, etc. I want to learn the inticacies of the OS as well as how to write scripts and maybe begin programming. I'm currently running LMDE 201109 on my laptop and it's running well. Can anyone recommend any good books for starters and more advanced features. My background is software support. In the past 15 + years i've had various jobs from supporting a large ERP system which ran on SCO Unix with C-ISAM databases and Windows environment running SQL server, i a qualified SQL Server DBA and currently work supporting a large financial application running on Windows and SQL / Oracle databases. Most of what i've learnt over the years has been self taught. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty or put in the hard work. I also have a spare Dell poweredge 4600 server sitting in my shed just waiting to be installed and used (was being thrown in the skip at work but it works perfectly, just a bit old) I'd love to get it working with Linux and use it properly.

Thanks in advance and well done on a great forum.

I like a lot of what No Starch Press publishes for Linux and other topics. Especially their book on Debian, though old now, is still good to get to know the internals.

For command line, well, long time back I read books similar to: Learning the bash Shell

But it really depends on the exact topics you want to get started with

A few lists of links to free publications

http://www.linuxtopia.org/

http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/

And a few specific recommendations

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-lin ... mate-guide

http://linuxconfig.org/practical-guide- ... x-commands

http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/08/awes ... .html#more

thanks for the links, i'll be looking at them later today. I'd certainly like to understand the underpinnings of the OS, how it all fits together, writing scripts to handle mundane things that you can do through the GUI. I guess a good start would be to understand the underlying filesystem (where everything is stored, how networking works, etc and then move onto more admin tasks and maybe a LAMP server on my Dell server. it's going to be fun learning all this stuff though.

For the basics of the filesystem (what you can expect to be where on modern Linux systems), the filesystem hierarchy standard is good reading: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/.