help with Shell/terminal/unix

[pants]

alot of stuff lately that i've wanted to use like the ffmpegx 6b and others, has been hard for me to install, cause i'm not really familiar with unix/the terminal, and i can't get things to work or install properly, like mplayer and mencoder. so i was wondering if people with more experience in this area might be able to reccommend some sites, books what ever, on getting a better basic grasp of what to do. these programs seem so cool, but i just can't figure these little things.

any help would be greatly appreiciated.

thanks

pants

[phoney]

Sorry, no handy urls or books, just a wiseass tip : One of the best ways to learn is to experiment by yourself...
Start by typing man in front of every command you are wondering about. man cd, man ls, man cp, man cat, etc.
these manual pages can be quite "tough" but for the simpler commands it should be bearable even for a novice. Exit the man pages by pressing q...
Some other basic commands/programs from the top of my head to start checking up on: pwd, chmod, pico, grep, rm, mkdir, rmdir, ps, top, kill, locate, find, head, tail
You also might want to know what these mean: | > ~

Well, I think that about covers it... ahem...