W. Richard Stevens is hard to beat on most things UNIX. I own at least 5 of his books and I think they are classics that should be on any UNIX System Programmer's shelf. Cheers.
UNIX Network Programming, Vol 2. Second Edition here http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Network-Programming-Interprocess-Communications/dp/0130810819
Systen V and POSIX IPC are two different, but related implementations of the same thing.
"Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV (and usually pronounced—though rarely written—as "System Five"), is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and first released in 1983."
-Wikipedia
"POSIX or "Portable Operating System Interface [for Unix]" is the name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API)"
-Wikipedia
Systm V was there earlier. POSIX evolved out of the standardization initiative by IEEE.
GNU/Linux is partially compliant with POSIX. Which one to use depends on which OS you are using this IPC. Most vendors are moving towards POSIX.
Unix Network Programming: Interprocess Communications v. 2 by Richard Stevens gives a good look into both of these.
Linux is the most accessible and has the most mature desktop functionality. BSD (in its various flavours) has less userspace baggage and would be easier to understand at a fundamental level. In this regard it is more like a traditional Unix than a modern Linux distribution. Some might view this as a good thing (and from certain perspectives it is) but will be more alien to someone familiar with Windows.
The main desktop distributions are Ubuntu and Fedora. These are both capable systems but differ somewhat in their userspace architecture The tooling for the desktop environment and default configuration for system security works a bit differently on Ubuntu than it does on most other Linux or Unix flavours but this is of little relevance to development. From a user perspective either of these would be a good start.
From a the perspective of a developer, all modern flavours of Unix and Linux are very similar and share essentially the same developer tool chain. If you want to learn about the system from a programmer's perspective there is relatively little to choose.
Most unix programming can be accomplished quite effectively with a programmer's editor such as vim or emacs, both of which come in text mode and windowing flavours. These editors are very powerful and have rather quirky user interfaces - the user interfaces are ususual but contribute significantly to the power of the tools. If you are not comfortable with these tools, this posting discusses several other editors that offer a user experience closer to common Windows tooling.
There are several IDEs such as Eclipse that might be of more interest to someone coming off Windows/Visual Studio.
Some postings on Stackoverflow that discuss linux/unix resources are:
What are good linux-unix books for an advancing user
What are some good resources for learning C beyond K&R
Resources for learning C program design
If you have the time and want to do a real tour of the nuts and bolts Linux From Scratch is a tutorial that goes through building a linux installation by hand. This is quite a good way to learn in depth.
Learning one of the dynamic languages such as Perl or Python if you are not already familiar with these is also a useful thing to do. As a bonus you can get good Windows ports of both the above from Activestate which means that these skills are useful on both platforms.
Finally, Cygwin is a unix emulation layer that runs on Windows and gives substantially unix-like environment. Architecturally, Cygwin is a port of glibc and the crt (the GNU tool chain's base libraries) as an adaptor on top of Win32. This emulation layer makes it easy to port unix/linux apps onto Cygwin. The platform comes with a pretty complete set of software - essentially a full linux distribution hosted on a Windows kernel. It allows you to work in a unix-like way on Windows without having to maintain a separate operating system installations. If you don't want to run VMs, multiple boots or multiple PCs it may be a way of easing into unix.
Anything by Mark Sobell. He does a sort of theme-and-variations for various flavours of unix, so pick the book most appropriate to the environment in hand. The books are quite good. One of his was a prescribed text when I did my B.Sc.
Some of these books have been in print for quite a while and are still relevant. Consequently they are also often available secondhand at much less than list price. Amazon marketplace is a good place to look for such items. It's quite a good way to do a shotgun approach to topics like this for not much money.
As an example, in New Zealand technical books are usurously expensive due to a weak kiwi peso (as the $NZ is affectionately known in expat circles) and a tortuously long supply chain. You could spend 20% of a week's after-tax pay for a starting graduate on a single book. When I was living there just out of university I used this type of market a lot, often buying books for 1/4 of their list price - including the cost of shipping to New Zealand. If you're not living in a location with tier-1 incomes I recommend this.
E-Books and on-line resources (thanks to israkir for reminding me):
The Linux Documentation project (www.tldp.org), has many specific topic guides known as HowTos that also often concern third party OSS tools and will be relevant to other Unix variants. It also has a series of FAQ's and guides.
Unix Guru's Universe is a collection of unix resources with a somewhat more old-school flavour.
Google. There are many, many unix and linux resources on the web. Search strings like unix commands or learn unix will turn up any amount of online resources.
Safari. This is a subscription service, but you can search the texts of quite a large number of books. I can recommend this as I've used it. They also do site licences for corporate customers.
Some of the philosophy of Unix:
The Art of UNIX Programming by E S Raymond (available online and in print).
The Practice of Programming by B W Kernighan and R Pike.
W. Richard Stevens is hard to beat on most things UNIX. I own at least 5 of his books and I think they are classics that should be on any UNIX System Programmer's shelf. Cheers.
UNIX Network Programming, Vol 2. Second Edition here http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Network-Programming-Interprocess-Communications/dp/0130810819
-Wikipedia
-Wikipedia
Systm V was there earlier. POSIX evolved out of the standardization initiative by IEEE.
GNU/Linux is
partiallycompliant with POSIX. Which one to use depends on which OS you are using this IPC. Most vendors are moving towardsPOSIX.Unix Network Programming: Interprocess Communications v. 2 by Richard Stevens gives a good look into both of these.
Unix Network Programming http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51V1DSSA8NL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
Linux is the most accessible and has the most mature desktop functionality. BSD (in its various flavours) has less userspace baggage and would be easier to understand at a fundamental level. In this regard it is more like a traditional Unix than a modern Linux distribution. Some might view this as a good thing (and from certain perspectives it is) but will be more alien to someone familiar with Windows.
The main desktop distributions are Ubuntu and Fedora. These are both capable systems but differ somewhat in their userspace architecture The tooling for the desktop environment and default configuration for system security works a bit differently on Ubuntu than it does on most other Linux or Unix flavours but this is of little relevance to development. From a user perspective either of these would be a good start.
From a the perspective of a developer, all modern flavours of Unix and Linux are very similar and share essentially the same developer tool chain. If you want to learn about the system from a programmer's perspective there is relatively little to choose.
Most unix programming can be accomplished quite effectively with a programmer's editor such as vim or emacs, both of which come in text mode and windowing flavours. These editors are very powerful and have rather quirky user interfaces - the user interfaces are ususual but contribute significantly to the power of the tools. If you are not comfortable with these tools, this posting discusses several other editors that offer a user experience closer to common Windows tooling.
There are several IDEs such as Eclipse that might be of more interest to someone coming off Windows/Visual Studio.
Some postings on Stackoverflow that discuss linux/unix resources are:
What are good linux-unix books for an advancing user
What are some good resources for learning C beyond K&R
Resources for learning C program design
If you have the time and want to do a real tour of the nuts and bolts Linux From Scratch is a tutorial that goes through building a linux installation by hand. This is quite a good way to learn in depth.
For programming, get a feel for C/unix from K&R and some of the resources mentioned in the questions linked above. The equivalent of Petzold, Prosise and Richter in the Unix world are W Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment and Unix Network Programming vol. 1 and 2.
Learning one of the dynamic languages such as Perl or Python if you are not already familiar with these is also a useful thing to do. As a bonus you can get good Windows ports of both the above from Activestate which means that these skills are useful on both platforms.
If you're into C++ take a look at QT. This is arguably the best cross-platform GUI toolkit on the market and (again) has the benefit of a skill set and tool chain that is transferrable back into Windows. There are also several good books on the subject and (as a bonus) it also works well with Python.
Finally, Cygwin is a unix emulation layer that runs on Windows and gives substantially unix-like environment. Architecturally, Cygwin is a port of glibc and the crt (the GNU tool chain's base libraries) as an adaptor on top of Win32. This emulation layer makes it easy to port unix/linux apps onto Cygwin. The platform comes with a pretty complete set of software - essentially a full linux distribution hosted on a Windows kernel. It allows you to work in a unix-like way on Windows without having to maintain a separate operating system installations. If you don't want to run VMs, multiple boots or multiple PCs it may be a way of easing into unix.
I think you could go for Dual boot as klez pointed out.
I have a HP2000z dual boot with XP and Ubuntu, and i really like Ubuntu a lot!
For C++, you could give Code::Blocks a try. Its open source.
Adding to orsogufo, I also suggest Unix Network programming Vol I and Vol II by Richard Stevens for Network related topics.
I've wiki'd this post - could those with sufficient rep add in items to it.
System administration, general usage books
Nemeth et. al, Linux System Administration
The Armadillo book, as mentioned by Bill The Lizard below.
Anything by Mark Sobell. He does a sort of theme-and-variations for various flavours of unix, so pick the book most appropriate to the environment in hand. The books are quite good. One of his was a prescribed text when I did my B.Sc.
Stevens' TCP/IP illustrated, vol. 1: The Protocols for a comprehensive run down on how TCP/IP works in detail.
I've never read this particular book, but many people here are recommending Unix Power Tools as mentioned by Hortitude.
Programming:
Anything by the late W. Richard Stevens, in particular Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment and Unix Network Programming Vol. 1 and vol. 2
Various classic c/unix books, such as The Unix Programming Environment, Advanced Unix Programming, Programming Pearls and of course K&R. The C/Unix books tend to go into the underlying architecture, and will give a fair degree of insight that's relevant across the board - these are the underlying mechanisms within the system. Anyone trying to do system-level programming (basically anything using system services, no matter what the language) will find a grounding in this to be beneficial.
Specific tools (e.g. Sendmail)
Various of the books from O'Reilly and other publishers cover specific topics. Some of the key ones are:
The Bat book on sendmail - if you have occasion to experience the joys of working with sendmail.cf. If you have a choice on MTA, postfix or qmail are somewhat easier to work with (I've been using postfix since about 2000). O'reilly publish guides to both of them.
Some classic works on perl: the Camel and Llama books (the latter written by none other than Randal Schwartz).
Sed and awk. Not sure what the critters on the cover are. My copy went south a while ago. While on the subject of this, Mastering Regular Expressions has also gotten a mention here and is a good book on the subject.
Samba. The hornbill (?) book covers this; there is also quite a lot of on-line documentation.
NFS/NIS for those using or maintaining unix or linux clients.
Some of these books have been in print for quite a while and are still relevant. Consequently they are also often available secondhand at much less than list price. Amazon marketplace is a good place to look for such items. It's quite a good way to do a shotgun approach to topics like this for not much money.
As an example, in New Zealand technical books are usurously expensive due to a weak kiwi peso (as the $NZ is affectionately known in expat circles) and a tortuously long supply chain. You could spend 20% of a week's after-tax pay for a starting graduate on a single book. When I was living there just out of university I used this type of market a lot, often buying books for 1/4 of their list price - including the cost of shipping to New Zealand. If you're not living in a location with tier-1 incomes I recommend this.
E-Books and on-line resources (thanks to israkir for reminding me):
The Linux Documentation project (www.tldp.org), has many specific topic guides known as HowTos that also often concern third party OSS tools and will be relevant to other Unix variants. It also has a series of FAQ's and guides.
Unix Guru's Universe is a collection of unix resources with a somewhat more old-school flavour.
Google. There are many, many unix and linux resources on the web. Search strings like unix commands or learn unix will turn up any amount of online resources.
Safari. This is a subscription service, but you can search the texts of quite a large number of books. I can recommend this as I've used it. They also do site licences for corporate customers.
Some of the philosophy of Unix:
The Art of UNIX Programming by E S Raymond (available online and in print).
The Practice of Programming by B W Kernighan and R Pike.