My Very Humble Journey into Learning Linux Part 1

6 min readJan 26, 2025

Hi! My name is Zach and I currently work in a warehouse. As of January 2025 I’m on my third month of career changing into the IT world. I’m publicly documenting my journey and one of my goals is I hope I can inspire people similar to my current place in life to leave their job and land their own IT role! Linux is VERY important to learn if you’re trying to get into IT because some companies exclusively deal with this OS because they believe Linux is more secure than other operating systems. Some jobs you can qualify for by being proficient in Linux include help desk technician, system administrator, and SOC analyst. This post is compiled of resources I looked into and future posts will potentially include projects.

The overall gameplan for learning Linux isn’t to get a certification but to get a couple projects under my belt. I also don’t want to passively learn by reading because there’s no way I can remember every command nor do I have the funds to even buy every book and course out there.

Back in June 2019, I started school in Lambda School and part of the curriculum included diving into the command line. While it wasn’t part of the program, I took the initiative to teach myself Linux. I even went as far as buying a Thinkpad and installing the Arch distro myself. For the uninitated, Arch is a bare bones flavor of Linux that is pretty challenging to install. I don’t remember all the nitty gritty behind it besides it taking several hours to figure out and I had to purchase a flash drive containing the program. For those curious, I was inspired by Luke Smith (his website).

My overall goal is to be proficient at Linux. It’s not to be A+ and spend the next 5 years trying to perfect it as there’s other skills (IE Powershell, cloud computing, system admin) I need to be good at to be job ready. I don’t want to fall into the trap of studying for the next 2 years and then finding out a technology is now out of date.

Cyber Mentor’s Linux 101 Course

With the Cyber Mentor’s Linux 101 course, the instructor, Brent Eskridge has been utilizing Linux for 20+ years. It’s refreshing to hear him say that he doesn’t know all the Linux commands since I’ve been studying Linux for far less time than he has. Another thing I appreciated is Brent understands where the beginner is coming from and tailors it in beginner friendly language. Sometimes, I’ve met professors and even professionals in other industries that can’t communicate to beginners. A very minor con I have with this particular course is I wish there was a way I can actively practice my Linux skills on the site itself. That way I’m not passively watching and forgetting what I learn days later. Here’s just a very short list of things I learned:

Explainshell
Sed (whole books can be written about this topic alone)
Bash scripting
Nano vs. Vim
Crontabguru (The quick and simple editor for cron schedule expressions by Cronitor)

Brent didn’t talk about this but in my opinion, one way to solidify your Linux skills is to utilize a cheat sheet near your computer so you can reference it until the commands become second nature to you.

Cyber Mentor has a Linux 100: Fundamentals course that looks very beginner friendly. There’s also a Linux Privilege Escalation for Beginners course in his catalog.

The Joy of Linux by Michael Hall and Brian Proffitt

What I like about this book is that it’s beginner friendly and it will motivate you to download a Linux distro into your computer. It seems like by going deeper into this career change I keep finding even more resources in these resources that I’m going to investigate further after I get my first IT job. This is just a small list of my notes so I don’t make this post too unreadable:

Join a local Linux User Group (LUG). The authors don’t spell it out for you but this could be a way for you to network your way into a job.
The authors criticize Microsoft (they call it Mickeysoft) and this then sets up the next chapter into the benefits of Linux (haha love it).
Vi vs. Emacs (Luke Smith details why he doesn’t use Emacs which you can read his reasons).
Elite of the elite hackers: Mitnick, Hackweiser, and Hackah Jak.
The real gem of the book was Chapter 13 which contained even more resources.

CodeAcademy

Code Academy (link here) has a beginner friendly command line tutorial but unfortunately I can’t access this at work and have to be at home on my desktop.

Linux Bible by Chris Negus

I read this book while on break at work and given my current situation it would be ideal if I had time and a computer to practice the commands. I know multiple people have recommended this book but for me, this wasn’t an A+ book in my very humble opinion.

However I did find some gems that’s relevant to my interests:

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) was mentioned which has rebranded into a new CISA.gov website. As you can see with how fast I process information I move quickly because technology changes rapidly. I did look into the CISA site and did find Federal Cyber Defense Skilling Academy, which is an intensive training program for full time federal employees.

The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification was mentioned but as I type this (December 2024) I think I should focus on getting my Comptia Sec+ as well as my Comptia Network+.

Embedded Linux by John Lombardo

This book is a little too advanced for me at the moment and I’m thinking about people that don’t even know what Linux is that would struggle to grasp the topics that are being discussed. I would keep this book to the side while I keep consulting other resources.

Linux for Dummies by Richard Blum 10th Edition

I quickly skimmed through this book because at the time of typing this I’m studying for the Comptia Security+ exam and to be honest I might have to push back my test date to March 2025. It’s a very delicate balance of not spreading myself too thin by getting into the weeds of Linux but at the same time I want to still keep developing this Medium account. Much like the title suggests, this book really does break down Linux in a manner somebody completely new will be able to understand. The biggest benefit you will get out of the book is being able to download Linux onto your computer even though the book covers admin related stuff like shell scripting and nano.

Fun fact: On page 22, the author mentioned WSL which is a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and I remember years ago trying to play around with it. If I recall correctly, I never managed to get proficiently good with that particular technology so I abandoned it.

Overall, IT is such a broad realm and I’m glad I can keep learning and it will never be enough. I’m more on the camp of I rather exercise my brain than strain my body. Working in a warehouse is taxing and some days it hurts to get out of bed.

Linux Basics for Hackers by Occupy The Web

Like the title suggests this is a beginner friendly book that covers topics such as networking, scripting, and process management.

Here’s just a small list of notes I took:

To be an elite hacker you need to be able to script in at least one of the following languages: Perl, Python, or Ruby.
To promote privacy protonmail and TOR VPN was mentioned.

How Linux Works, 2nd Edition by Brian Ward

This book is beginner friendly and goes into basic and intermediate command line commands. There’s plenty of other resources mentioned so if you wish to learn more about Linux you can follow up with those resources. This book has system administrator relevant subjects like resource monitoring and networking basics.