jamie - 7:20 pm on May 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

i am in the same boat as many of the above: the time came one day when i had to learn and we couldn't afford managed services (back then managed services weren't as cheap).

to learn, the most important thing imo is to set up a home pc (any old box) with exactly the same distro and version that you want to use online. after you have installed this distro take away the monitor and only connect via ssh (i use putty) - this puts you in exactly the same mode as when remotely connecting to the server.

the rest is playing and practice - it won't take long before you get confident enough to move to a live server. blue splinter gave some excellent book tips - nearly all those books are within arm's length of my desk (especially the server hacks ones).

just take the plunge! (and learn vim ;)