Documentation is something that some people appreciate and others do not. I was among the class of those that did not. Using Linux put me in the class that did. Learning to appreciate documentation early on will help save you many a headache with using this operating system. Before I point you to resources that you can use, I will share some of my misfortunes.
As a Windows user I was accustomed to playing with settings until things would work the way I wanted them to. Doing this normally resulted in no injury to the system. The habit continued even into using Linux. Linux however fixed that. After I installed Fedora Core 4 in December of 2005 I quickly found I had some tweaking to do to get things working, but the graphical interface didn't seem to tweak or configure much. I soon found the only way (at the time) to get my video driver and wireless drivers working properly would involve using the command-line. I used it and installed my video driver first, rebooted the system, only to find my monitor displaying an interesting message telling me "Out of Range." My new Linux installation was now not accessible, or so I thought. Time for a clean install. I did that clean install a total of three times only to find that the problem was with how the driver tweaked my xorg.conf file. I had to manually set my monitor's refresh rates to avoid that problem. If I had read up on possible issues with xorg.conf, I could have possibly avoided the three reinstalls and made progress with setting up my system.
Another time that reading documentation is helpful is when a warning pops up on the program you are using. As a new Linux enthusiast and comfortable user I thought I could handle setting labels on my different partitions since I ran three or four different distributions. I used gparted (might have been the PartitionMagic clone) and clicked on setting the disk label (this is much different than changing the label on your partitions). A warning popped up which I thought was nothing because we are setting a new label and as a result just closed it without reading it (bad move). Not long after setting the new disk label all partitions that were in view disappeared. I had just changed the system that kept track of the partition tables and as a result all partition on that hard disk were now gone. I realized the mistake I had made and hoped it wasn't applied, so I rebooted only to find that even Grub had disappeared. Thankfully no important data was lost, and the only thing that was hurt was my pride.
So if you ever read in a support forum or chat channel the expression RTM or read the manual, please take it to heart. It is never a bad thing and yields more good than evil. Documentation is your friend in this new world because this new world will let you do anything, and only sometimes does it let you know you are about to get into trouble. Place high value on those manual pages and other resources.
The man and info commands are fairly helpful. If you are looking for quick answers Google is normally more helpful, but sometimes if you know what you are looking for the man pages are a help too. Using info will help with most GNU packages such as emacs, info, bash, etc. You can pull up a directory of all info documentation on your system by only typing info at the command prompt. To find out more about how to use man or info just type in the commands "man man" and "man info."
If you are looking for more friendly guides than manual and info pages, some other resources may be in order. The Linux Documentation Project (www.tldp.org) has excellent guides, tutorials, how-tos, and also all the man pages. O'Reilly (oreilly.com) is a publisher that most high quality books on Linux and other free/open source packages come from. Forums specific to your distribution are another great place to find help.
Hopefully you can avoid the same pitfalls and others that I ran into as a new Linux user. Expect to need to do some reading or a lot of time repairing your system without it. These days using your system the way I used Windows is a little safer now thanks to the administrative tools for Ubuntu and Fedora. When I started we were beginning to make the transition and I sit among those who know how to use the command-line. Your experience should be more pleasant.
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