Well, first: you do not have to! And second: don't! ;-))

Here is the long version of the above: you do not "have to" read and know everything we wrote about above. It just helps you tremendously if you do. Like with picking up any skill you start out small and get better over time. You might want to know everything above if you want to be an expert, but you need next to nothing to start out.

You will notice that UNIX is very economical when it comes to learning something: the same concepts are used over and over. Say, network programming, *is* a complex task to understand, but having understood the concept of a "socket" and how to use it you will notice that it is used in so many places that you have in fact learned a whole lot of nominally different things at once. The same with "regexes": learn them and you will find out that what you have learned for sed helps you to use grep and that awk uses the same and ... .

Finally never forget that the people who are answering you here haver probably a 3-digit number of years of practice under their combined belts. I work in IT for about 35 years now and for the last 20 years i have done systems administration. I have no recollection of what my first steps looked like, but surely not any better than yours.

After that much encouragement i'd like to balance that with a disheartening notion, though: it will take time. You will have to learn it like any craft. If you want to become, say, a mason, you need to learn three years (here - maybe that is different in your country, but probably not far away from that) as an apprentice, then become journeyman, then learn another one to two years and become a "master". Do you think becoming a UNIX systems administrator is much easier than becoming a mason? I thought so! If you planned to start today, write your next client/server- killer app tomorrow and become rich and famous next week: get a lottery ticket. It offers better chances.

It *will* take time and it *will* take hard work on your part, but finally you might come to the understanding that what we do is a craft only at the *core*: in the long end it is an art! We might practice our craft skills like a sculptor is practicing his stone cutting skills - as a necessary fundament to practice his art. What sets apart the excellent from the mediocre UNIX expert is that the excellent one will (at least try to) achieve artistic value in his solutions. It is this artistic value that requires fundamental understanding of why things are done this way or the other and this understanding is taught in the books i recommended. You will not need them to create a user account, install a network connection or mount a filesystem. You will need them to get from knowing what you do to understanding what you do, though (and why they are done this way).

The UNIX toolset is like an orchestra, waiting for the conductor: it is your artistry alone that makes the difference between them sounding like crap or like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

I hope this helps.

bakunin