Quote Originally Posted by narnold View Post
reed9: Thank you! Now we're cookin' with gas - this is precisely the kind of answer I'm looking for.

Again, thank you. I wish I could find a good book that would sort of give broadly outlined insight like this at the beginning of chapters, but I have yet to find one. I realize, however, that this IS a rather tall order .... not easy to recall when one is writing a book that the readership needs to be led by the hand!
One of the best ways to learn, in my opinion, is to play with a more DIY distro like Arch, Slackware, Crux, or Gentoo, even if you don't use them as your main day to day OS. They force you to get under the hood more and learn how things work. I have no educational or professional background with computers and most of what I know is from running Arch. Even if you don't run Arch, it is widely recognized to have excellent documentation, much of it applicable to any distro. Gentoo also has some very good documentation.