On Fri, 09 Mar 2007, Christopher D Maher wrote: > How do you learn about Linux (coding/networking side of things)? As > in being able to set up servers/clients. Is it just a matter of > downloading a distro, installing then playing?
The most important participle is 'reading'! You could do little better than keying the command:- man man into a console terminal and going from there. Keying man:/man into Konqueror offers the same information presented in a much nicer format. For coding you might care to start with an interpretive language, Ruby & Python are probably the best with which to start. Some of the best textbooks come out of the 'Pragmatic Programmer' stable, followed closely by those from O'Reilly and Associates. http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ In particular note:- http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html This is the second edition which is a vast improvement over the first which is freely available for free download off the web. http://www.oreilly.com/ In particular note:- http://safari.oreilly.com/ The Christchurch Public Library has a subscription to a sub-set of these on-line books. For a basic starter on administering your Linux box there is the RUTE book available either for free off the Web or as a printed book. It's somewhat past it's useby date now, but it is still very usable and useful. http://rute.2038bug.com/rute.html.gz For networking there are lots of Web pages and books. See:- http://rute.2038bug.com/node28.html.gz for a ( very ) basic grounding. For a start into C coding there is my own puny effort ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/misc/sawtell_C.shar or locally http://shell.clug.org.nz/~chris/sawtell_C.shar Some 3000 souls have told me how they have been helped by it, so I supposed it can't be too bad. -- CS
