> Since starting to use OS X, I've delved a bit into Unix, mostly out of
> curiosity to see what I can do with it. But the trouble is, you can't
> just delve a bit into it; to do anything of value, you apparently have
> to spend several years studying it, preferably as a computer science
> major at Cal Tech or Berkeley or MIT, and I just don't have the spare
> time for all that.
I was a math major, and my introduction to UNIX was when my boss at my first IT job (I love this guy!) decided some of us should be more than call center agents and gave us a half-morning UNIX 101 course. Later that day, those of us who had a clue were logging into servers and poking around. That was pretty much my formal training, other than eventually taking a course on performance tuning, and UNIX is more or less what I do for a living now. (Note: I'm talking sysadmin and application level stuff--I'm not a deep systems guy, much to my regret as I think I'd be good at it.)
All the best,
John A