Some suggestions: Direct your focus to plain Bourne sh as much as possible, moving on only after you understand what enhancements over vanilla sh Korn or Bourn

Some suggestions: Direct your focus to plain Bourne sh as much as possible, moving on only after you understand what enhancements over vanilla sh Korn or Bourne-Again actually offer. Pick up Manis, Schaffer, and Jorgensen's "UNIX Relational Database Management" and work through the examples to get a feel for the philosophy behind large, complex applications written in shell. Join a Unix community (sdf.org) and try to do useful things with shell (e.g. cron-schedule stock quote e-mail notifications via shell scripts, etc).