[lug] Learnin Linux on yer own..... my own little RFC!!!

[Hugh Brown]

Yup.  I have to agree.  You don't tend to learn anything interesting
otherwise.

The great part about nuking your system is learning down the road that
all you had to do differently was add a character in a config file
somewhere and everything would have been fine.

Hugh

> 
> All the other notes about working with LINUX/UNIX are great, and are without 
> question some items to tackle, but I would put one skill ahead of all of 
> the others:
> 
> 	The willingness to play around.
> 
> No matter if what you are doing is System Administration, Programming, 
> Support, or what, this is by far the most important skill.  Yes, at first 
> you will probably start out mucking things up royally (at least I did and 
> so have several people I know!), but you learn from this.  If you manage 
> to get your test system so bad you have to wipe the hard-disk and start 
> from scratch, great...you get another chance to get more information out 
> of the install process.
> 
> In the last several years, I have worked with a lot of computer people 
> ranging over just about every side of computing you can immagine.  The one 
> trait that all of them who were good at thier job had in common was the 
> willingness to play around.  Eventally, and sooner than you might think, 
> we all reach a point where the results of the playing around produce bad 
> effects only rarely...and most of those can be corrected quickly before it 
> becomes a problem.  I am willing to bet that any good programming/sys. admin/
> whatever could say, though they might not outwardly admit it, that they 
> frequently do things that they do not know ahead of time will work.
> 
> And furthermore, I would have a low opinion of anyone working in computers 
> who claims they always know the solution to every problem in advance.  This 
> is a fine answer for the end-user in most situations, but computers are 
> changing so fast at the moment and the field is growing so rappidly that 
> almost nobody can know everything.
> 
> Well, enough rambling...just my 2 cents worth for you to think about.
> 
> --David