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Progress Checklist

Track every chapter, capstone, tier checkpoint, and milestone in the handbook here. There are 54 chapters, 7 capstones, and 3 tier checkpoints.

These checkboxes are visual only

Ticking a box on this website doesn't save anything. To track your real progress, copy this page's Markdown into your own notes or git repository (for example ~/linux-notes/progress.md) and change - [ ] to - [x] as you finish each item. Committing each tick gives you a dated history of your progress for free.

A chapter counts as done when you have:

  1. read it and typed every example yourself,
  2. finished all its exercises without opening the solutions (or redone them the next day if you peeked),
  3. answered the check-yourself questions from memory, and
  4. written a short summary in your own words.

A capstone counts as done only when it works without notes.

Getting started

🌱 Beginner tier

Tier overview

Level 0: First Steps

Level 1: Command Line

Level 2: Scripting

Beginner tier checkpoint

Without notes, you can:

  • Explain the purpose of /etc, /var/log, /usr/bin, /home, and /tmp
  • Write a pipeline that prints the 10 most frequent IP addresses in a web server log
  • Explain why x permission on a directory differs from x on a file
  • Write a script with set -euo pipefail, trap, and getopts that passes shellcheck
  • Recover from a dropped SSH connection without losing a running job (tmux)

🔧 Intermediate tier

Tier overview

Level 3: How Linux Works

Level 4: System Administration

Intermediate tier checkpoint

Without notes, you can:

  • Explain what GRUB, the initramfs, and systemd each do during boot
  • Explain what a zombie process is and how to get rid of one
  • Explain the difference between "free" and "available" memory
  • Write a systemd service and timer from scratch, and debug them with journalctl
  • Explain how a DNS lookup works on Ubuntu, from /etc/nsswitch.conf to the stub resolver
  • Rebuild the Level 4 capstone server in a fresh VM in under an hour

🚀 Expert tier

Tier overview

Level 5: Building for Linux

Level 6: Expert Topics

Expert tier checkpoint

Without notes, you can:

  • Explain, using strace output, every syscall cat file.txt makes
  • Explain why a container is "just a process", and name each kernel feature that isolates it
  • Find the hottest function in a CPU-bound program with perf and a flame graph
  • Debug a segfault from a core dump with gdb
  • Rebuild your Level 4 server with a single ansible-playbook run

Milestones

Habits and real-world wins that show the skills are sticking.

  • Studied on at least 5 days in one week
  • Logged 10 entries in the "mistakes I made" log
  • Solved a real problem at work or home with a pipeline
  • Wrote a script you now use every week
  • Set up a practice VM and took its first snapshot
  • Broke the VM badly and recovered it from a snapshot
  • Read a man page end to end to answer your own question
  • SSH'd into your VM with a key, with password login disabled
  • Fixed a broken service using only systemctl status and journalctl
  • Explained a Linux concept to someone else
  • Rebuilt a capstone from scratch, a month after you first finished it
  • Finished all seven capstones