While I agree with the whole "Learning how to cook" analogy, I still belive that, when starting, you don't really need to learn all the server setup mumble jumble. It is true, you DO need to know how to navigate through directories and such if you'll be developing directly in the server, and you need to learn how to setup your tools (if they don't come up prepackaged in your VPS solution), but aside from that I don't see the use of learning all of that. On a side-note, this just gave me an idea for a series of posts in my blog ;D