For various reasons, I have had UNIX thrust upon me. Can anyone recommend a GOOD UNIX reference book for a beginner? Any help is greatly appreciated! 
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Apart from books don't forget the internet can be very useful. Some books that have helped me are "Complete UNIX guide", "Essential System Administration" Apart from that there are a few others, depends what kinds of things you need to learn/know first.
Example I needed to learn administraion and networking (still do 
) and backups. Started with a few books like the above sat down infront of a Solaris box and played around.
Personally the best way for me was to set myself a little task learn how to do it. Then go to a test machine and try it in practice. Of course this only works if you have a machine that you can crash and burn. If there's no crash and burn machines be very careful with what you do to a machine.
Don't forget the 'man' pages are a good place to start with Unix. (In case you don't know about the man command it stands for manuals, to run the command something like this "man ifconfig" that will show the manual/help pages (whatever you want to call them) for the ifconfig command)
Don't forget search engines (www.google.com). They are always a good little tool for finding stuff. A good website is docs.sun.com others will have others but I like that one.
Or you could just hit work up for some starter courses and learn the easy way
I really like "Unix System Administration Handbook" (Amazon.com). I have found it to be quite handy.
For FreeBSD Stuff, I really like the on-line FreeBSD Handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html\)
Just search for some MAN pages. If you bought your version, it should have specific mirror sites to go to for that version.
good luck!
Here are some very good links.
http://www.unix.com/showthread.php?...20907\#post20907
There is an O'Reilly CD called UNIX Bookshelf which is great for reference. It has 6 books in one.
Try to find this book at your local bookstore, It'sgreat for windows users:
A UNIX Hater's Guide to UNIX
I have read through that so-called "unix haters" book.
It is filled with people who either didn't understand what they were doing or weren't paying attention to what they were doing.
Unix can be a VERY unforgiving OS. The assumption is that we actually KNOW what we are doing.
"Knock on wood" (my head) I have never had a catastrophic encounter with UNIX. And the times that I have had serious problems, they were MY OWN fault. Nothing to do with the OS itself. UNIX is very elegant in its spartan manner and probably the most stable OS that we well ever know of...
A smart man learns from his own mistakes...
A WISE man learns from other's mistakes as well...
