1) Download a distribution. I would recommend Fedora Core, or Mandrake, because they're fairly simple and are easy to understand.
2) Explore. Poke around the root directory, look at files, learn the layout. Get a general idea of where things would be.
3) Learn to use the terminal. It's the bottom line, it gives you complete control of your system. You can do _anything_ with the terminal. Learn a bit of shell script, learn basic bash commands. Don't forget about the other shells, either. Before bash, there was sh. There's also tcsh, and zsh. All good things to try.
4) Read the man pages. Every distribution comes with it's own giant manual built in. Type 'man' into a terminal, followed by the name of a program, and you'll get tons of info about it. There's also the info pages, an even bigger source of information.
5) If you don't know what something will do, try it. There are tons of basic programs included with linux. Try them. They're all uniquely different and important.
6) If something doesn't make sense, try and figure it out. Don't give what up, there's always a solution.
Just try and absorb anything you can. One very important thing, though, practice. If you learn something, don't forget it. Do it every now and then to refresh your skills. It's very important to do, Linux is so complicated, so it's very easy to forget things.
