Become a Linux Guru

[Sandy Harris]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Kaushal Shriyan
<kaushalshriyan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have been working on Linux for quite sometime. What are the necessary
> pre-requisites and techniques to be adopted or any specific skills to become
> a Linux Guru or Expert ?

Explore. Try a few different Linux distros and at least one of
the various *BSD open source Unices. Play around. Take a
surplus PC, stick two ethernet cards in it and build a working
firewall. Make another control your house or a robot or ...
Or build yourself a home theater PC.

One thing to read, not specific to Linux, is:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

In general, read everything Unix or Linux-related you can get
your hands on. In particular, guides to sys admin, networking,
security, ... and historical material. Both will lead you toward
expert status better than most end-user docs or forums will.

Lurk on developer mailing lists for any projects that interest
you. Don't ask stupid questions (site linked above has a doc
on that too), in fact probably don't post at all until you are
sure you can contribute rather than asking.

Learn at least a few languages at least well enough to
get simple things done. One is the shell. Others might
be C, Emacs LISP, Perl or Python, ... depending what
your want to do.

For the shell, you don't necessarily have to learn to create
thousand-line scripts. However, it should become second
nature to automate some task that needs a half-dozen
commands, and reasonably easy to look at someone
else's large shellscript, say in /etc/init.d, and get a good
idea of what it is doing.