learning terminal commands

Use Bill Scott's webpage.

http://xanana.ucsc.edu/xtal/unix.html

I am constantly looking stuff up in the manual pages, and Bwana works really well for that.

Or you could open the following URL in Safari.

x-man-page://ssh

or the following to open a manpage from a particular section.

x-man-page://4/unix

They'll pop open a Terminal windows displaying the manpage.

there are tons of online tutorials covering the basics.

try these:

http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-productivitytips.html?ca=dg r-lnxw07UNIX-Office-Tips
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/ct/15
http://tldp.org/
http://www.bsdguides.org/
http://bsdforums.org/

those links aren't os x specific, of course. if you want a reference for os x specific advice, you might try unix for mac os x or the apple developer pages.

O'Reilly has a plethora of good UNIX books.
Check their web site: http://www.oreilly.com/
I would suggest UNIX in a Nutshell: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unixnut4/

Mihalis.

I used to use the Terminal, and an AppleScript that converted man pages to PDF, but I kinda like having all of the man pages, system and library calls, file formats, and other miscellaneous items on a tab in Safari (plus, the links to other manual pages work).