Fedora

Unix-like OS are used for various purposes since it's quite versatile. ~92% of the TOP500 Supercomputers use Linux, Google uses it for it's webservers and spider/indexing farms, Home-/SoHo-NAS usually run an embedded version of Linux or BSD, as do some TVs and Access Points, ...

As far as I know, all unix/linux have command line. In our datacenter (I work for trading company), I never spotted any GUI on unix, only command line.
I'm learning with unixacademy dvds. It is all about command line. It comes with training and certification and I just passed two first exams. You can pick any edition you like (my favorite is fedora). It is effective and very inexpensive. I tried various books, but in my experience book reading is good for more advanced stages, when you mastered some basics.

Even though it has a server version I'd tend to agree. When people ask me for advice on it most of the time is spent fighting the autoconfigurators and a small fraction on making it do what you actually want it to do... Fedoracore, SuSe, and Gentoo are much less windows-like.

Great thread. This was some of the info I was looking for and some of the questions I didn't ask. I feel like a baby deer surounded by lions though, as far as my technical abilities and knowledge go. I have some old hardware that I'm going to download some version of UNIX on. still not sure which one..will have to do some more research first and then start playing around on it. I do have an old version of "UNIX for dummies...probably older than 2000 but should have some of the same commands taht I would need? I'll start playing around with that and get a little experience. Keep working on A+, network + just to get my foot int he door some place.

actually "for dummies" is not a bad book at all! I read it even before I had my hands on Linux and despite it didn't contribute to skill development, it was very good "pre-linux-unix" reading.