UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Well, you certainly should not waste a bunch of money and time on training classes.

You can easily configure Linux, or some open Unix variety, on a server for very little money and then work on a project yourself. You will learn much more configuring a system from zero and building your own applications than going to class and paying a lot of money.

Most of the folks best folks here have never taken one unix or linux class; they learned by doing the work on the platform.

Just do it and stop coming up with excuses not to do it.

Hi Neo,

Thanks for the advice, i've been looking through the reccomended books section but they only show advanced programming tutorials on unix and perl etc, the only one closes to a begginer was unix in a nutshell and even in that it stated that it should not be used if you are a complete begginer, do you have any recommendations for a grounds up approach and for a complete novice in unix, ive also been looking at some materials on unixacademy.com which for the price sound quite decent. I'm going to go home tonight and finally install centos 5.5 on my virtual box but need some good text to get started with, my mission is to get started on unix and then expand into the networking side of unix and then programing shell etc with pearl and then move into mysql and java aswell. you mentioned about configuring your own system from scracth or building your own server and applications but surely this requires basic understadning of the unix environemtn first, any good books that could guide me through this process please?

Many Thanks

any good advice would be appreciated from a unix guru like yourself.

If you are committed and motivated, as I was years ago, you don't need our encouragement. You just do it. Since I was 20+ and dived into IT, I rarely was looking around for anything else. For smart guy with no money and great technical talent, I did well and all my long hours of learning did pay it back. Looking back, though, I see that I may have had some better chances in my life if go the other way. See, there's tradeoff.
It is very long term commitment. Choose it wisely. Make sure that it is something that you would like to be doing when you are 40, 50, 60 years old. You wouldn't be able to change the track then.

Stuff I've forgotten.
Basic, Fortran V, Cobol 61, COBOL 74
Univac OS1100, TIP Transaction Processing
Univac OS3 (90/30) IMS90
RPG-II IBM S34, @36
IBM S34 Mapics
RPG-400, AS400
JD Edwards Accounting
ASK Data 3 Manufacturing.
Unix System 3
DIBOL
How to convert FLDATA to EBCDIC to ASCII

The point is just about every thing you will learn about computers will be obsolete in 5 years.

Install Gentoo on a dedicated machine(You don't need a particularly new computer -- anything pentium III and up should do), following the Gentoo Handbook. It's more or less a whirlwind tutorial for the whole Linux environment. If you follow the instructions very exactly, they work quite well. If you have problems, there's not just this forum but the gentoo forums and the gentoo IRC channels to help you.