I never learned Linux really.
I had a good chance to contact with computer when I was a kid (around 11 years old) and most of the time as kid, gaming on window is a part of life. Window was not very stable at that moment (3.11 and then 95), so sometimes it hanged and could not recover (by virus, broken files, …) when I installed new games, and I got lot of trouble with my mom, because she needed the computer to do the office work. Gradually, in order to get out of the trouble, I had to fix the OS by myself (simply re-install or delete / replace the broken files so the OS can work again). This happened so many times (more than 10 re-installation per month if I remember correctly) and make me have enough patience when trying new thing. Also, installing new thing and exploring the software became my interest, even I didn’t use those softwares later (cracked softwares was everywhere in my country during that time, because we didn’t have internet at that moment).
Back in 2006, when Ubuntu became popular and was on the PC world new papers nearly every month, I obviously wanted to have it on my PC, so I enrolled to Canonical for the free CD. The installation was exciting and I loved it right in the first time, because of the amazing effects of Compiz Fusion and Beryl theme. Also, I could configure the OS looks like the way I want through Eyecandy for your GNOME-Desktop. Then I realized that on Linux, instead of going outside and buy softwares or going to the torrent site to download things with loads of virus, I can just check on the repository and download it freely. So, with the interest of a kid, I installed any kind of software I found on the repository and started to crash the OS, because the Ubuntu repository is not stable at that moment (lot of conflicts in the libraries and most of the time I have to trigger the magic command line “sudo ./configure; sudo make; sudo make install” as the parts of the installation to replace the new library version). Eventually, I am more comfortable with the terminal than the mouse cos it is extremely fast and cool (:D) when working with the terminal. From 2006 until now, Ubuntu is my main OS for daily usage (I am a software engineer now)
What I am trying to say is: don’t force yourself to learn. If you are new to something and start to find the book to read (I am not sure why lot of advices here say you need to go with Unix programming or art of command line, what would you do with those after you finish reading?!!?), then more than 50% you will waste your time, because you haven’t developed your interest before that. Learning is boring and boredom will kill your interest before it actually grows. So, instead of that, just installing the OS and playing with it until you are comfortable. Your interest will lead you to the right way before you actually realize that.
(Taken from my own post on Quora)