Nuking your computer is a part of the learning curve. It will happen one day. And if that happens on a production server, it hurts quite a lot more, than on you

Nuking your computer is a part of the learning curve. It will happen one day. And if that happens on a production server, it hurts quite a lot more, than on your own desktop machine. "Server Administration" is not only "having the feel". Server administration is experience. If you haven't been in hell, you can't prepare for going there. Of course, this is only true if one really wants to learn "system administration". If one wants to be able to fix problems when the whole office is standing on his head (systems not working). If one wants to just be able to deploy their "hobby project", then fine, go with the copy/paste way. You don't need anything more than that.