Recipe A.2. Books and Magazines

First, check out any printed manuals for your Linux distribution. Red Hat and SuSE's manuals, for example, are very good.

These are my choices for an essential Linux library:

Linux in a Nutshell, by Ellen Siever
Running Linux, by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Terry Dawson, Lar Kaufman
Mastering Regular Expressions, by By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Building Secure Servers with Linux, by Mick Bauer
Linux Server Hacks, by Rob Flickenger
Essential System Administration, by Æleen Frisch
Linux Security Cookbook, by Daniel J. Barrett, Richard Silverman,
Learning the bash Shell, Second Edition, by Cameron Newham, Bill Rosenblatt
Linux Network Administrator's Guide, by Olaf Kirch, Terry Dawson
TCP/IP Network Administration, by Craig Hunt
PC Hardware in a Nutshell, by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson

You'll notice there are no distribution-specific publications, and nothing for dummies or idiots. Just good, well-written, thorough Linux materials.