RE: Get more out of the ls command
I was working with a new developer yesterday, trying to give him enough knowledge of Linux to continue exploring on his own. The central problem, I think, is that he does not "love the command line". If you don't love working from the command line, you'll never be a great Linux user.
You can always add --help to any Linux command and usually get a pretty extensive list of options to use.
If I'm in a directory with a lot of files, I like to do 'ls -l | grep myfile' to find the file I'm looking for.