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For anyone just starting I highly recommend: "Linux Pocket Guide" and if moving forward adopting linux as a daily driver "Efficient Linux At The Command Line". Both books by Daniel J. Barnett.
Even if you're a seasoned Linux user you will learn a lot from those books.
Just a nitpick: Barrett, not Barnett. It's nice to see a new edition of Linux Pocket Guide come out just 2 years ago.
Thanks for pointing it out! I visually checked the books on the shelf but my eyes tricked me and confused "rr" by "rn".
QQ: even when I use Linux as a daily driver I don’t use the cli much. I heard that getting a cheap vps, set up some popular services, and then exposing it to the Internet actually teaches a lot about sysadmin. Does this make sense?
One big issue for me is that when I use Linux I only use it for a specific purpose, e.g. hacking kernels, and the cli commands are extremely limited. I have been using a Linux box for a year and haven’t learned much TBH.
Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me. Learned about screen and tmux to keep it running and be able to detach and reattach. Learned vim to deal with configs on the headless server.
Another thing that helped me learn a lot was what I call "anime playlist management", but may be too niche to recommend. Basically after I moved from VLC to mpv I had to create and add to playlists without a gui. I learned a lot about the find command, text redirection, vim, fzf, file permissions... I retrieve the full file path for the videos and dump that into a .m3u file that I then watch in mpv or rearrange later in vim. find helps to get to the exact files quicker even when everything is sorted neatly into separate directories, fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively. find can also filter by mtime, so I have some one-liners that just show e.g. all files 7 days old or newer in the media directory, easy to rerun and select the stuff I just downloaded to put in the playlist.
At some point I preferred vim over geany or whatever other text editor I used to use. It's nice to be able to use the same tools everywhere, including over ssh, so that reinforced a preference for stuff that runs in a terminal. irssi, aerc, stig+transmission-daemon, neovim, mpv (controllable over ssh). Also having a file server gets you more into rsync, sshfs, stuff like that.
I've made several vim macros to speed up the "anime workflow" as well. Like I add new episodes to the very bottom of the file, but the file has sections broken up by empty lines, and I have a macro to take everything just added at the bottom and move it to the bottom of the top section, where the high priority stuff goes. I also have macros to delete the top line of two side-by-side files in vim at once, saving both. I have both a human-readable list and the actual playlist file and then I delete the lines as I watch.
I've been incrementally refining this workflow for several years now. Just find something you enjoy doing and try to polish it, learn more applicable tools you can incorporate, etc.
> Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me.
This seems to have been the gateway to systems administration for a surprisingly large number of contemporary young people - just like IRC, Quake and Counterstrike servers in my teen years, and futzing with config.sys & autoexec.bat for DOS games when I was a kid... And the hacking soon becomes more fun than the game itself !
Absolutely! In my opinion, the only way to learn anything in any meaningful way is to actually do the thing. In the example you described, you'll quickly start jumping into "Wait, how do I configure a firewall?" and discovering ufw et. al.
Love both books by Daniel J. Barrett.
"The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts is pretty good book for new and experienced command line users. He has also written the supplemental book "Adventures with the Linux Command Line". The author has also generously provided them for free download at https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php.
I didn't know about this one. Looks an in-depth book on the shell as well. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the recommendation. Both books seem to about the command line. How are the books different?
The pocket is perfect for beginners. It has a nice introduction in chapter 1 that explains all essential concepts to understand and operate the console. Then it is basically a sort of reference of a moderate list of most useful commands for performing different tasks.
The "Efficient" book is an in depth walkthrough of the shell and how to reason and combine important commands to perform not trivial tasks. It is certainly a book to be re-read from time to time because it has plenty of good tricks and explanations.
Thank you for both of these recommendations.
You should really remove the entire PDF of the book that you've shared on a public repo. No Starch Press is a gem and worth protecting.
That's the first edition (2019), not the second (2025). But both are in annas archive, anyway
"Someone else has pirated this, so it's OK for me to do it as well" isn't a good argument.
If you see litter on the ground already, that doesn't make it OK to litter more.
I can think of a better analogy than littering for pirating an item at more than 1 place. When you litter, you add to the trash. If everyone littered, it would be awful. But if everyone pirated the same content on a different site/platform/protocol, it would still be 1 pirated item.
The better, IMO, analogy, is if you have an ad glued somewhere, say at a bus stop. Another person comes with their ad and wants to glue it. They glue it over the previous ad. The amount of ads visible remains the same. There's a negligible disadvantage for the city - they have to haul away twice as many paper. But most importantly, the amount of visual clutter hasn't been increased if the second ad is glued over the first one.
That analogy works if you're against piracy and ads on public places, of course.
People trying to justify piracy was tired in 1997 and it's embarassing now.
It would be better if you just embrace the fact that you're unwilling to pay for creative effort and OK depriving creators of money - that isn't my ethos but it's at least honest and consistent.
Arguing that piracy doesn't hurt someone is trivially wrong, lazy, and self-centered.
This isn't even abandonware. If you don't want to buy the book, go to a library or read a publicly accessible blog, but piracy is bullshit full stop.
Did a tree ask you for payment for shade?
Did the stars ask your payment for their light?
Did the sun ask you for payment for its warmth?
Did the Earth ask you for payment for your life?
The knowledge that allowed you to flourish was paid in blood by our ancestors for millions of years.
Knowledge is shared freely. It is not piracy to learn, but it is tyranny to restrict it.
People trying to justify anti-piracy was embarrassing in 1997. It's petty and sanctimonious now.
Not everyone lives in rich Western countries with cushy Silicon Valley pay grades; lots of folks are young, studying; they may be temporarily underemployed, or simply have to prioritise other costs.
Knowledge is a right, not the privilege of a moneyed minority.
You have no claim to other people's knowledge or work. If they want to share it, it is on their terms.
If you're prioritizing other costs, then prioritize those. You don't have an inherent right to consume everything in history.
Not even remotely comparable.
It's also freely available from https://kea.nu/files/textbooks/humblesec/linuxbasicsforhacke... and plenty other places with a quick search.
first edition is also available on Internet Archive in multiple formats
Not to mention
Adobe fixes PDF zero-day security bug that hackers have exploited for months
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/adobe-fixes-pdf-zero-day-security-bug-that-hackers-have-exploited-for-months/Why is that relevant? Are you saying that this PDF is infected?
On top of that, who uses Adobe software to read most PDFs?
I'm saying pdfs are famous for being malware delivery devices so it's ironic (and silly imo) to distribute one with a hacking guide.
Looks like someone just pointed an LLM at the PDF and asked it to write a Markdown version. Very poor show.
Here is the Publisher link for the official just released 2nd edition.
Why is this marked (2019)? Besides the book PDF, everything seems to have been created in a commit 3 weeks ago. The way some things are phrased smells of LLM style as well.
90s Solaris dude here .. Unix Power Tools was the book that had the most borrow rate in our office ..
I’m fairly sure I downloaded a copy way back when, probably from some BBS, from the other end of the world where I used to live
That, and the Anarchist Cookbook..
I would say knowing linux basics should probably come _before_ identifying as a "hacker"
What has this to do with "hackers"? And can you share your experience in your personal study with "ifconfig" as described in Module 3?
Based on the nearly decade old first edition of the book (2018). I was wondering about the retro vibes.
awesome post. much appreciated, thanks
the kind of post I internet for. A+. thank you
pure rage bait
my comment was genuine it was a helpful post
Just had a quick look, Damn this looks good man!