Frequently, there are some things we need to do, tweak system settings, execute some processes, however even on Ubuntu, sometimes there isn't a GUI to perform such tasks, which is why we come to places like Ubuntu forum, askubuntu or even search on Google.

Then someone provides us a terminal command that allows us to do whatever we need at that moment to solve a certain problem. So I see that learning the language behind Linux can be extremely useful. But all I've been doing so far is to execute the commands, sometimes I don't even understand what I'm doing while executing them, I am just following instructions from someone else.

I would like to understand more about Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular, I don't want to master Linux or run everything on terminal, I like Ubuntu just fine for modern PC's, user-centric and graphical, but I just would like to know the basics and at least to be able to understand what a certain command is going to do on the system.

What is the best way to do this?