Using Linux is no more difficult than using Windows. (Assuming your using a comparable distro....).
For instance:
Using Ubuntu or Suse 10 are really no more harder to use than Windows. It's just that you are used to Windows and how to do things there and are not used to Linux.
With that said alot of things in Linux make more sense than Windows and some things are even easier to use.
For instance just yesterday a user had a hard drive with bad sectors. I tried everything with my BartPE disc and all of it's HD fixing/imaging tools. Nothing was able to recover the files....heck windows wouldn't even let me view the partition!
Not even Acronis or Ghost could do anything since as soon as it hit those bad sectors either Ghost would crash or Acronis would hang for hours.
Heck, I even tried SpinRite 6! I left it running for days! (Yeah, I know all about proper data recovery but according to the user the data wasn't that important and I wanted to test out Spinrite).
Finally I booted up the latest Ubuntu Live CD. Mounted the NTFS parition. Simply opened up a window viewing all of the files on the filesystem. Opened up another Window to a fileshare on my Windows server. Copied over the files and I'm done!
Now why couldn't I do that using Windows with all of the tons of utilities I've accumulated over the years? Truth is those utilities still have to rely on the underlying OS......and that was the problem right there.

As for Learning Linux Books. I can't really help ya there. Just segment off a block of time and dig right in there with some Ubuntu/Slackware/Suse/Fedora CD/DVD's.