If I may chime in, Slackware for the Distroand Running Linux for your book are the best IMHO for learning how to do things in Linux without all the graphical gimmicks, &c. And when I started I was a novice in the extreme, (and paid for it dearly: every accedentally format your windows partition which has all the install files that just took you 7+ hours to download? Stale Lilo? &c).
It's about the only distro that make sense to me, and I've been running it on my PeeCee (which I'm almost ready to throw out the window, but that's a differnet story) for quite some time now. Debain's installer truely belongs in the hall of shame, albeit it's package system is nice. And I've never gotten Debain to boot on my A4000 (NetBSD works well for it, tho')! I had bad experiances with Redhat a long time ago (Version 5 & 5.2 were absolutely horrible), maybe it's gotten better. Never tried Mandrake, so I can't say.
Just be sure to know what you've got in your box, and your monitor's refresh rates (although the new XFree can supposidly detect them if it's a newer Svga monitor, I've got an old sun monitor, so I've no such luck) and you should be ready.
Anyhow, good luck regaurdless. Linux, and Unix in general might not make much sense now, but they will start to once you work with them for about a year or so.
Clark