The following resources are some of those which FreeBSD newbies have found most helpful when learning to use FreeBSD. Please send corrections and additions to FreeBSD-Newbies@FreeBSD.org.
This web site is the main source of up to date information about FreeBSD. Newbies have found the following pages particularly helpful:
Search the Handbook and FAQ, or the whole web site, or the archives of the FreeBSD-Questions mailing list.
The Documentation page has links to the Handbook and FAQ, tutorials, information about contributing to the Documentation Project, documents in languages other than English, and much more.
Support page contains a wealth of information about FreeBSD, including mailing lists, user groups, web and FTP sites, release information, and links to some sources of UNIX information.
A number of tutorials are available. The one For People New to Both FreeBSD and Unix is popular with absolute beginners. You don't have to know much about anything to enjoy this one. It is also available from the author's site and can be downloaded in postscript or RTF format for printing.
The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey, published by Walnut Creek CDROM. This book assumes minimal UNIX experience and takes the beginner step by step through each stage from installation to everything you need to know to set up and run a FreeBSD system. You also get to understand what you're doing and why.
The FreeBSD Handbook and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are the main documents for FreeBSD. Essential reading, they contain a lot of material for newbies as well as some pretty advanced stuff. Don't worry if you can't understand the advanced sections. The handbook contains the installation instructions and also provides lists of books and on line resources, and the FAQ has a troubleshooting section.
Join the FreeBSD-Questions mailing list to see the questions you were too afraid to ask, and their answers. Subscribe by sending mail to majordomo@freebsd.org with "subscribe freebsd-questions" on its own in the message body (the subject doesn't matter). You can look up old questions and answers via the search page.
The main newsgroup for FreeBSD is comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc. You might want to keep an eye on comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce as well.
Man pages are good for reference but not always the best introduction for a novice. The more you work with man pages the more familiar they become. Some are very good for newbies, so always check them out. The ppp man page, for example, is more like a tutorial.
Many of the problems we have as newbies come from being unfamiliar with the UNIX commands needed to fix our FreeBSD problems. Without a UNIX background you'll be faced with two things to learn at once. Fortunately a lot of resources are available to make this easier.
There are many easy books, such as the "Dummies" guides, in any large book shop. If you want something really easy, take a look at what is available and pick one that seems to speak your language. Pretty soon you will want to move on to a book that gives more coverage.
One book mentioned frequently by newbies is UNIX for the Impatient by Paul W. Abrahams and Bruce R. Larson, published by Addison-Wesley. It is intended both as a book for learning UNIX and a reference, and includes an introduction to UNIX concepts and handy chapter on using the X Window System.
Another popular book is UNIX Power Tools by Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly and Mike Loukides, published by O'Reilly and Associates. It is organised as a series of short articles each of which solves a problem, and these articles are cross-referenced to other articles with related material. Though not specifically aimed at newbies, the design makes it ideal for a newbie with a burning question or the odd few minutes to browse. More elementary material is near the front of the book, but there are short easy articles throughout.
A UNIX Introductory Course from Ohio State University is available online in HTML, postscript and Acrobat PDF formats.
UNIXhelp for Users is another introductory guide which is available in HTML at a mirror site near you, or can be installed on your own system.
UNIX questions are dealt with in the newsgroup comp.unix.questions and the associated Frequently Asked Questions. You can also get a copy of the FAQ from the RMIT FTP site. Newbies are likely to be most interested in sections 1 and 2 initially.
Another interesting newsgroup is comp.unix.user-friendly which also has a FAQ. Although this newsgroup is for discussing user-friendliness, it can contain some good information for newbies. The FAQ is also available by FTP.
Many other web sites hold lists of UNIX tutorials and reference material. One of the best places to start looking is the UNIX page at Yahoo!.
Before talking to real humans about your new skills, you might want to check the Pronunciation Guide.
Friends who run FreeBSD are a great resource. No book can replace chatting on the phone or across a pizza with someone who has the same interests, enjoys similar accomplishments, and faces the same challenges. If you don't have many friends who use FreeBSD, consider using your old FreeBSD CDs to create some more :-)
User groups are good places to meet other FreeBSD users. If there's not one nearby, maybe you could start one.
On line we have the FreeBSD-Newbies mailing list for non-technical discussions about matters of interest to newbies. Another mailing list, FreeBSD-Questions, answers our questions about using FreeBSD.
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