Introduction and Advice

[mark]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Jake Tingley <jtingley1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello
>
> My name is Jake and I live in Warner.  I am a high school math teacher in
> Lebanon and I am interested in working with Linux and doing some
> programming.
>
> What is the best way to get started?
> Is there a particular distribution I should be looking at?
> What is a good first language to learn?
> What do people think are good resources (both online and books)?
>


Hi Jake,

My name is mark, I live in Concord, and I've been a professional system
administrator for nearly 15 years.  The best way to get started is to do an
installation.   The easiest installations are the "live CD" method, where
you boot from a CD of the distro of your choice and you can install from
there.  There are many to chose from:  http://www.livecdlist.com/

I would recommend either Fedora or Ubuntu if installing from a Live CD, and
CentOS if installing from the ISO version.  Ubuntu is one of the more
popular versions for personal use, and is based on the Debian distribution.
Both Fedora and CentOS are based on RedHat, which is what you would find
more of in the corporate environments.  All three are free (as in beer) of
charge to download and use.

The first thing you'll want to learn is shell scripting, and definitely
start with bash.  There is a good Linux tutorial here:
http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/

and a good one on bash here: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sh.html

After learning bash, what you'll want to learn next will be highly dependent
on what you will plan on using it for.  Perl, Python, and PHP are all good
candidates.

The best book on shell programming, in my opinion, is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Shell-Programming-Stephen-Kochan/dp/0672324903
good examples, clearly explained and makes for a good reference afterward.

The SAMS "Unleashed" series are good if you want something that covers
Fedora or Ubuntu as a reference work.  The Osborne "Complete Reference"
series are also not bad.

Here are some more reference links for you:

http://www.shelldorado.com/
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
http://www.taobackup.com/
http://www.webmin.com/intro.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/lnag/lnag_learning.html

Have fun, hope this helps,

mark
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