What is best book for learning Linux as a beginner to become expert

Hello all,

What do you all recommend as being the best book for learning Linux.
A book that keeps things real.
I mean it it is for practical day to day operation and management and not theoretical
or not practical.

Also it would be very good if this book has a few through sections about MySQL,
and has related information about Jakarta Tomcat, Qmail and Postfix.


I appreciate your thoughts.

Regards,

I like the WROX books. 'Beginning Shell Scripting' and 'Beginning UNIX'. As for the best book, well that's just subjective. Though they're not text books and not all inclusive, they do have good examples on scripting. There's also plenty of resources on the web. As you go along, I think you'll find that the web is a rich resource when looking for something specific. Good luck.

Get your hands on a low end computer and install one of the distro's out there and play with it. You won't have to worry about blowing anyone except yourself out of the water. This will also teach you the first part of Linux, carving up your disk(s) into proper partitions.

Cheers

I don't personally have a recommendation for any particular book, but you won't learn anything without doing. If you can get hold of some machine you can practice on, without risking ruining anything important, that would be a great bonus whether you have a book or not.

you could use cygwin or msys until you are ready to dive into linux. o'reilly has quite a few good linux books. I didn't learn that way. There are also numerous tutorials online. buying a book for linux+ might be a good way to get started. I learned a lot from mine.

I agree -- your best bet is to install it on a computer you are not using and then use Google to look for some tutorials. Getting used to Linux and knowing the ins and outs is a lot of trial and error. You need to be good at problem solving and be very patient when you first get into it.

reminds me. Going to ibm developerworks and searching for lpi certifications might help.

Are you more interested in server or desktop stuff? Also, are you more interested in Slackware, Debian, Redhat, or SUSE style distros?

I agree you really have to do it yourself. However, I personally didn't really much Linux stuff using just using nicely packaged OS's like Ubuntu, Fedora etc on my desktop. Once I installed Gentoo on my server I learned more in a weekend than I had in the previous month.
www.gentoo.org
www.gentoo-wiki.com