Now that you know how to work with online Linux documentation, I will tell you this: “Online Linux documentation is good, but it just is not enough.” This means that man pages are useful if you already familiar with how a particular program works, but are very unhelpful when you do not.

To get yourself started you need to read a book or find a small recipe which allows you get started which is called a “how to”. For example, to get started with Apache web-server you may google for “apache how to”. That is ok, and that is what Google is for, but now I will give you a big warning:

Do not follow any How To blindly, ever!

The correct way to use Google is this:

1. Find a “How To”.
2. Follow it, but read, or at least skim, through all man pages for programs about which you do not know about. Also, read about all options in the howto which are unknown to you. It is that important.
3. Not paste, but type most of commands, the hard way. It requires some effort, but really helps to memorize them and even better understand what you are doing.

Sometimes it is better to search a particular site instead of blindly typing stuff into Google. This is list of the useful resources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org is invaluable when getting initial information about some topic. Its links section is even more invaluable.
2. http://stackexchange.com/ This is very useful site for finding information about usage examples and use cases. StackExchange network includes several resources, of which most useful to you are http://serverfault.com/ and http://unix.stackexchange.com/. http://stackoverflow.com/ is a very useful resource when you are doing bash scripting.
3. http://www.cyberciti.biz/ contains many useful “how to's” and examples.
4. Homepages of many programs provide good and sometimes great documentation. For example this are for apache and ngnix, respectively: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/, http://nginx.org/en/docs/.
5. http://tldp.org/ is The Linux Documentation Project and contains many in-depth guides about different topics.

Google has a query language which gives you ability to execute powerful queries. This is main commands of this language:

1. (screen|tmux) how to — search for screen and tmux howtos at the same time. Remember about shell parameter expansion? This is similar.
2. site:serverfault.com query — search something on this site only. You may search several sites at once with (site:serverfault.com | site:stackexchange.com)
3. “a long query” — shows you only those pages which contain this query exactly.
4. -query — excludes something from search results.

1. Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search and find out what else can be searched. Try searching for file types and last updated pages.