Recommended Reading

Here is a list of books I recommend:

	The Linux Command Line by William E. Shotts, Jr. A companion volume to LinuxCommand.org, this book is available for free download in PDF format and in printed form.
	Linux Phrasebook by Scott Granneman   This handy, pocket-sized (well, if you have big pockets) book provides a quick reference to many common commands. See my review.
	A Practical Guide To Linux Commands,Editors, and Shell Programming by Mark G. Sobel Covers most of the common command line tools available on your Linux system. Makes a good suppliment to the system man pages by providing many helpful examples of common commands. This is a good book for becoming familiar with what the common command line tools are and what they are used for.
	Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, and Trent R. Hein A really good reference work covering all of the common issues in system administration. It provides in-depth coverage of a number of underlying technologies you should know about. Read my review here
	Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, 101 Scripts for Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix Systems by Dave Taylor A "cookbook" style presentation of many useful scripts solving common system and web server administration problems. The scripts are a little lightweight for production use, but make good starting points for futher development on your own. Note that this book assumes that you already know a few things about Linux/Unix and the shell.
	Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins and Nelson H. F. Beebe A good treatment of shell programming that covers the common classes of problems that you solve with the shell, particularly text processing. While rather densely written, it would make a good follow-up to my tutorials.
	Learning the Bash Shell, Third Edition by Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt This is another one of the great books from O'Reilly. While this is not a really a book for absolute beginners, it is clearly written and fairly complete.
	The AWK Programming Language by Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger  AWK is a programming language that is often inserted into shell scripts. The syntax of AWK is very similar to the C programming language in which Linux/Unix and its utilities are written. Learning AWK will make you familiar with concepts that appear in many other programs. This book, written by the original authors of the language, is probably the finest programming book I have ever read. Filled with examples and clear explanations, this book will give you a taste for the power of this useful language. Note that this book is skinny and really expensive, but I think it's well worth it.