There's a basic and premium price plan – premium subscribers can store course materials offline, as well as download practice materials.
To access this course, you must first subscribe to Lynda. Essential Commands (Ubuntu) is authored by Scott Simpson, who has also designed a number of Linux-related courses. The course focuses on mastery of the basic commands involving administration of the Ubuntu OS, one of the most popular flavors of Linux.
The training website formerly named and now rebranded as LinkedIn Learning hosts dozens of Linux-related courses including this one, which has the full title of Linux Foundation Certified System: Essential Commands (Ubuntu). There are a number of ‘try it yourself’ activities, too, which allow you to perform tasks such as working with files.Īlthough the images and diagrams used in the videos are rather simplistic, this course is very popular on edX (being rated at 4/5 stars) and is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the essentials of Linux. Introduction to Linux is more than just text and videos, however.
The course is designed as a series of learning videos to help people who have basic IT skills to become familiar with Linux, both using a graphical interface and the command line. Introduction to Linux has been prepared by Jerry Cooperstein, the Training Program Director for the Linux Foundation, and there's even a short welcome message from the creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds himself so it's safe to say you're in good hands. However, there are also a number of paid for courses, which can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. One very attractive feature of these courses is that some of them are free to take, such as Introduction to Linux, although there is an additional fee if you want a formal 'certificate of completion'. The Linux Foundation offers a number of online courses via the edX platform including this Introduction to Linux. After all, while Linux operating systems require regular security updates, they are rarely targeted by computer viruses simply because Linux computers are such a small market share.
Of course, you don't even have to be a business user to want to learn Linux. Perhaps more importantly, these are also the common platforms for cloud services (opens in new tab), so to administrate these it can be very helpful indeed to have a good knowledge of Linux behind you, along with some experience of using it. Whether it's RedHat (opens in new tab), FreeBSD (opens in new tab), Ubuntu (opens in new tab), Debian (opens in new tab) or CentOS (opens in new tab), it can help to be familiar with at least some of the basic operations, whether for accessing them directly, for understanding IT reports, or even to better understand security concerns. This is increasingly important because Linux is becoming an important operating system to be familiar with in business, not least because the majority of web servers run on various Linux platforms.