Question on Linux books

[Chessum]

Hello, I've been trying to find resources to learn about Linux so I can be confident about its use before installing OpenSUSE. I found two books listed below and uploaded PDF files of both of them. If any of you have read these books before, or have read the linked files enough to get a solid opinion, I am interested in hearing if you believe that these are legitimate learning tools or something that will just gather dust. Thank you for any help you can offer.

How Linux Works: What Every Superuser should Know  by Brian Ward

How_Linux_Works_(2004)[BrianWard].pdf

The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction  by William E. Shotts Jr.

The Linux Command Line.pdf

I'm sorry if this is the wrong section. Between this and the ebooks section and the OS section, it seemed this was the safer bet if I wasn't sure.

[shadow125]

I have read that book How linux works ,  and I highly recommend it. If you are a beginner there are some complex stuff you may leave aside for later, but the essential is there. Now I am aiming to obtain the LPI certificate ( linux professional institute), and I'm currently reading LPIC-1 Linux Professional Institute Study Guide (pdf on attachment), and let me say, this is the right book for a beginner to start learning. You may not want the LPI certificate, but it is still very good material, just remember to practice.

[x40a0e]

What I found to be the most helpful was trial by fire. I dual booted Linux and Windows for a couple of weeks when I first started. I found that I would get confused about how to do something under Linux and would just switch to Windows. I wasn't getting anywhere, so I just removed Windows and forced myself to use Linux only. I needed a tablet and phone around to search wikis and read forums and all that, because I would break things all the time, but I learned a lot that way. I started off with Ubuntu and tried to use the terminal for as much as I could handle, then I moved to a more involved distro (Arch).

Regardless of what distribution you choose to go with, I would highly recommend Arch/Gentoo/Slackware if you are trying to learn about Linux (after an intro in an easier distro), because you are forced to set up everything manually, and learn what happens behind the scenes in Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSuse and the like.

In addition to this, if you do prefer the book style learning to the getting your hands dirty style O'Reilly has some good books on Linux.

[Chessum]

     Thank you for your replies. Currently, I'm trying to spend most of my time running openSUSE through a virtual machine, switching to windows when there's a program I need that requires it(As far as I can tell from researching all of my programs, the only things where this will matter is for gaming, everything else has a Linux version. Hopefully once the other computer is repaired I can move further with this by installing something like Gentoo or Arch. Having a computer that is exclusively Linux will probably help a lot more than the hardware inhibited version that Virtual Box is running.