@lori I also had this book! I probably have it buried in storage somewhere. I should dig it up.
An excellent intro to Linux. I also had an incompatible wifi card and dragged an extra long ethernet cable across my parents' house to get myself plugged in.
Before I knew it I was running a headless Linux server on the old family desktop PC and hosting a PHPBB server for my friends at school to use.
Learned Bash, LAMP, Asterisk, and tons of other fun FOSS stuff. Changed my life.
@Alex It wasn't for another few years when I went to college that I started using it seriously, when I got a MacBook and dual booted Linux and OSX. WiFi was still a pain but being such a common piece of hardware I was able to find driver's for the MacBook and eventually got it working. I went back and forth across OSes from then on, I've always been someone who uses whatever tech makes sense for me at the time so it means shifting things around a lot. But right now I'm strongly enjoying being back in the Linux world, Windows 11 just really frustrated me.