Resources for developing general familiarity

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Ages ago, when I was first developing familiarity with IBM compatibles (MS-DOS 5.0 era), the best way to do that on one's own was DOS for Dummies. I'm looking for a similar resource that makes no assumptions about user level but also doesn't wrap up without actually building familiarity. There are TONS of books out there, but I've been balking at them out of a handful of specific concerns:

  • Unlike MS-DOS, Linux is not monolithic. A chapter on advanced uses of yum will not help me.
  • Software advances orders of magnitude faster today than in 1992. While information on the general directory structure of Linux has stayed the same, lots else has changed dramatically in the last few years. A four year old book will be a mix of useful, dated, and useless.

So I'm asking here, what good resources are there for building a strong foundation without learning everything piecemeal by solving problems? It doesn't have to be a printed book, but this and /r/linux4noobs are question/answer, rather than "sit down and develop familiarity."

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I do like books, and recommend these to get a general sense on how things work:

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Thanks. I do believe prices like that are justified on this sort of book, but it also makes them that much worse to buy and have it be outdated or otherwise unhelpful.

Edit: I only just realized the above could be read as misgivings about your recommendations, which wasn't my intent, but meant as further reason I hadn't been buying books without recommendations.

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I strongly recommend checking out Humble Bundle from time to time. That's where I buy all most my books from when it comes to technical topics. They have book sales on all sorts of topics ranging from programming, to story telling, system administration, etc.

You can get a bundle of 20 books for $20. Some of them may be outdated but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are unhelpful. For one, because even an outdated answer will get you much closer to where you want to go; at the very least, now you know what you are looking for.

The two books about Linux that I recommend above in particular are perfectly fine. The core concepts are largely the same, with very few differences.

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I've used Humble Bundle for tabletop RPG books many times. Even if the system is a previous edition, getting a ton of setting lore for next to nothing is great. I think I got a Python programming book from there that I intended to use once, also.

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The author of the Linux Command Line has an interesting site at linuxcommand.org. If you check the Books link you will see the 5th Internet Edition (2019) of The Linux Command Line, and also the 2023 companion book, Adventures with the Linux Command Line, available as a free pdf download on sourceforge. The site itself is a brief version of the books, with an interesting sections on Learning the Shell, Writing Shell Scripts and Resources.

Just editing if you go to linux-training.be and look at the Oct 3 2021 surprise, a new PDF, you will find an updated version of Linux Fundamentals which the author describes as incomplete, but useful up to about page 600. It starts out with shell of course, then into scripting and file system etc. It looks pretty useful with the explanations and then exercises.

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