But there really isn't a bad way to learn... I learned linus while working at a summer camp in Vermont. I would read a whole bunch of chapters of Running Linux (O'Reilly) during the week, and when I had some time off on the weekends, I would finagle my way into getting to use one of the office computers for a few hours, and then booting up tomsrtbt, as well as a couple other floppy disk distros whos names I can't remember, and playing around.
Later on, when I got back to the world, I installed RedHat 5.2 (ah, back in the day) on my main machine, and went through the sometimes painful process of reading HOWTO's (www.linux.org has a whole bunch), FAQs, man pages, bugging people I knew, and on IRC to find out how to get things configured properly. Linux in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) was indespensible during those first few months, but I haven't actually used it for actual moving around through the OS in a while.
So... the best way to learn Linux depends more on you than on what anyone else did. My way involved a handy mix of just about every method available (including classes at my university), but it can certainly be done on a budget; there is virtually an infinite amount of free linux documentation out there, and if you ask nicely on IRC or usenet you will probably find a few folks willing to help you.
By the way, you WILL be wanting X-windows. Why? Because reading HOWTOs (when you finally get it hooked up to the internet, that is) in console just plain sucks. Think of X-Windows as a way to keep multiple terminal windows all open at once, so you can use one for reading documents, and another for trying out the commands. It is an invaluable tool, and once you master the command line, you will find that using a windows manager is slower than molasses in January in comparison. Just remember that the command line is your friend, and you should take every opportunity to do anything you can think of on it instead of using something GUI until you have mastered working without graphical features.
Happy Hacking!
starX
www.axisoftime.com
