I don't have any first-hand experience with any Mac books, but I've heard people say good things about the "Missing Manual" series. I'm sure there are several other good ones as well - I'd suggest doing a search at Amazon and reading some of the reviews. The Terminal app is kind of the OS X version of the Windows "cmd" window (or what many people call a "DOS window"). It's actually provides a UNIX command line environment (called a "shell"), however, and is real live UNIX. Note that it is *NOT* Linux (though the two are quite similar), so if you look for a book make sure it's either specifically about the Mac Terminal app or else BSD UNIX in general (though there are a few differences between those two, also). Since you're new to this I'd also suggest you learn the "bash" shell environment, since that's the default on the Mac. I know this can seem overwhelming, but if you get something akin to "Terminal for Dummies" (I just made that up) and take it slow it'll start to make sense in no time.