The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO
November 9th, 2008
via tldp.org
This document is intended to help Linux and Internet users who are learning by doing. While this is a great way to acquire specific skills, sometimes it leaves peculiar gaps in one’s knowledge of the basics — gaps which can make it hard to think creatively or troubleshoot effectively, from lack of a good mental model of what is really going on.
I’ll try to describe in clear, simple language how it all works. The presentation will be tuned for people using Unix or Linux on PC-class machines. Nevertheless, I’ll usually refer simply to ‘Unix’ here, as most of what I will describe is constant across different machines and across Unix variants.