One thing I do is make /home the last partition on the hard drive so that when I start mucking around and break everything or just whimsically feel like reinstalling I can keep my home dirs happy. Note that this is not necessarily the most efficient use of disk structure, just a handy bit I like to do. That way you can work around the bedrooms while remodelling the house.
Otherwise, good places to start include Running Linux, linuxdocs.org (part of metalab.unc.edu or was related), Learning Debian/GNU. Of course, that's Linux not UNIX, but most of it will translate pretty well. rick -- A picture is worth about 25000 characters. Any more and it takes too long to download.
