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I'm learning all this stuff for fun in my spare time.

I've found TLDP really helpful. I'm going to try a LFS build as soon as I'm happier with vi - I actually learned to ed (for fun), which came in really handy for learning to grep. I'm working my way through distros that force me to learn before I'm happy (then I move on) - started with Linux Mint, moved onto a Debian minimal install, now I'm making Gentoo my personal distro.

As a complete beginner, man pages would just blur in front of my eyes. Now I read them like novels, gasping with delight when I find a useful new switch!

grep, regex, TLDP "guide"books, wikibooks, LPI Essentials Guide (from linupfront) and generally googling for "advanced [keyword] tutorial" like bash, zsh, grep, regex, globbing were all helpful. I tried getting books out of the library, but they were all stuff I knew, except for Networking for Dummies, which was a big help for a complete noob like me learning TCP/IP principles (even though it's Windows based, the standards are all the same) and it's good for when things with ipconfig comes up.

That's me, anyway...