I thought "Learning Perl" was great. At that time (a year ago) I had never used a *nix system, ever. I had tried Perl but was confused by it's Unix slant. Learning Perl On Win32 systems helped me out alot.

It was Perl, more than anything else, that got me into Unix, and hence, Linux.

I got more out of chapter one than I do out of most computer books...

'course I already had a good base in c/c++...