I am pretty sure a lot of people, myself included, learned things by actively messing with it. Books are helpful for basic, but for everything else, just insta

I am pretty sure a lot of people, myself included, learned things by actively messing with it. Books are helpful for basic, but for everything else, just installed a Linux distro (I like Debian!) and then proceed to play with it. Read a few online articles (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1414&bih=671&q=optimizing+apache&aq=f&aqi=g6g-v4&aql=&oq= http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=141...) and just build your experience slowly. I use VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.virtualbox.org/) to install Debian on my Mac/Win boxes. Good luck and as always there's #apache on freenode.