You'll find plain-English information here about using Linux on a personal computer or on a shell account provided by your ISP. After a brief history and overview of Linux, you'll find a concise and occasionally light-hearted treatment of these topics.
This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)