There are a lot of books... however I rmend reading the manuals. italic nI know... it's a lot... but I did it (3 decades ago) and it works really well. Here are a few sites with unix manpages n I'm sure there are other good sites with manpages as well. Rmendations for what to focus on first (though I do rmend you read the ENTIRE manual end-to-end after learning these) - learn bash really well. italic Read every single line of the manual and figure out what the heck they're talking about. Learn every variation of how to tweak a variable how to do filename expansion (globbing as opposed to regular expressions) what all the builtin functions are and how they work. - learn Vi (or Vim if on Linux) italic - exceedingly awesome editor. Sure use a tutorial and don't bother to dive down the ratholes of macros or settings tweaking unless you're really into those things 'cause you'll wake up months later wondering what happened. - learn awk italic . Awks associative arrays can help you solve some serious problems. Once you know how to use awk you'll never look at a flat file or a unix pipeline quite the same. You can't learn too much awk. - learn sed. italic Also awesome both for modifying files on disk and for applying mods to every line of fed through a pipeline to it. With those four as cornerstones you'll be a UNIX power-user in no time. They don't all work the same or have the same conventions... but you'll get over the hurdles and be all the better UNIX expert in the end. ALSO - once logged in - the 'man' and 'apropos'mands are your friends. Read learn experiment and build up yourmandline piece by piece. Start small and build. Example of building up amand line find . - f -print me all the files in the current directory and down find . - f -print | xargs file me what kind of file each of them is (and handle filenames with spaces in them properly) find . - f -print | xargs file | egrep -v GIF|JPEG|PNG|PDF me just the files that are NOT gifs jpegs pngs or PDFs. UNIXmands are kind of like LEGOs - you can plug them together in cool ways. So get used to building up pipelines that do what you want. I guess most of all... don't expect to be given a ged tour. Instead treat UNIX like a huge machine where each part does have a manual and can be understood and make it a habit every day to spend time wandering around in that machine exploring it end-to-end corner-to-corner until you know it well enough to call yourself a UNIX power-user.