Well...you decided use *nix! I am proud of you. I am a beginner to *nix myself but I would like to share what I know. It all may seem daunting at first but it really isn't all that bad. If you are familiar with DOS it isn't all that hard to get. I am going to assume you have a computer with it installed so I will not go into how to install it. There are a few different shells that you can use but the only one I know how to use is Bash (Bourne Again SHell). The first thing you should do is to login. *Remember* choose a good password; make it at least 8 characters long that uses a combination of upper and lowercase letter along with numbers and meta-characters. When you login, if this is your machine, type: pwconv . It will shadow your passwords so other users can cannot rip them off and crack them. If you use the ls command it will give you a list of all the files in the current working directory. Using the -a switch along with it will show all of the hidden files with them. Using the the -l switch will list the file permissions. If you want to use both switches just combine them
ex: ls -al . If you ever have to many files to display on screen at once pipe the cammand to more. Ex: ls -l | more . It will only display one page at a time so you will be able to read them. To change directories just type cd followed by a space and the directory you would like to switch too. To read a file use the cat command.
Ex: cat (filename) | more . It is usually neccesary to pipe it through more b/c the files usually have more than one screen of text. To delete a file all you have to do is type: rm (filename) and all you have to do to delete a directory is type rmdir (directoryname). To logout all you have to do is type logout or if it is you machine to shutdow type: init 0 or type init 6 to reboot. Init stands for one of the many runlevels *nix has. I know this is incredibly short but it should help you out a little bit in moving around the *nix filesystem.