Best Linux Courses and Resources for Developers

Linux runs most of the world's servers, containers and cloud infrastructure. Whether you're a backend developer, a DevOps engineer or moving into the cloud, being comfortable on the Linux command line is one of the highest-leverage skills you can build.

This guide covers the best places to learn, ordered roughly from first steps to certification, and a study plan to make the learning stick.

Free resources to start with

A few more free resources worth knowing:

• The Linux Command Line by William Shotts — a thorough, beginner-friendly book that the author makes freely available online.
• Your distribution's documentation — the Ubuntu Server guide, Arch Wiki and Red Hat documentation are all excellent references, even if you don't use those distributions.
• man pages — every Linux system ships with its own manual. Running man ssh or man find is a habit worth building early.

Structured courses and certifications

If you're aiming at enterprise roles, Red Hat's RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) is another well-regarded, hands-on certification.

What to learn, in order

1. Navigation and files — ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, find, and how the filesystem is laid out.
2. Viewing and editing text — cat, less, grep, and one terminal editor (nano or vim).
3. Permissions and users — chmod, chown, sudo, and why you shouldn't run everything as root.
4. Processes and services — ps, top, kill, and managing services with systemctl.
5. Package management — apt or dnf, depending on your distribution.
6. Networking basics — ssh, curl, ss, DNS lookups and firewalls.
7. Shell scripting — variables, loops and conditionals in Bash to automate repetitive work.
8. Logs and troubleshooting — journalctl, reading logs in /var/log, and diagnosing a service that won't start.

Next steps

Once you're comfortable with Linux, containers are the natural next step — start with our practical introduction to Docker. If cloud is your goal, our AWS learning path builds directly on these skills.