Duckula - 4:28 pm on Mar 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

That depends more on how much time do you have. I've learnt a lot just by reading HOWTOs, documentation, mailing lists, etc. but each time that I do something new, like installing a CD burner, that takes a few days of extra reading.

If you need to know exactly what you need right now, go for the training courses. If you have the time to burn and patience to read documentation, teaching yourself will probably give you a more through understanding of the system, at the expenses of an ocasional need to reinstall while you are learning that the turbolinux packages are not compatible with redhat :)

If you're learning by yourself, install it on your own, non-production box. And don't worry: the version conflict happened to me several years ago, but my actual box has never needed to be reinstalled; as a matter of fact, I only put the disks of my old box on this.