At this time the use of Linux based systems in enterprise varies greatly, depending on your goal you can look at enterprise servers, mobile systems, high availablity clusters etc...
The real question to ask before you start looking at books and courses is which field would offer the most potential jobs, highest job satisfaction and best pay.

In comparison to Windows based system which are generally enterprise desktops, web-servers and basic services there is a lot to consider and even more to learn to before a proficient linux admin.

If you tell tell us what components you are most interested in then maybe we can recommend suitable reading materials.

We all forget little things like that every once in a while, I would also like to recommend adding your the remote server to your hosts file and adding port entries to your ssh.conf file for the remote hosts.

In addition, have you considered using an array of values for remote hosts in the script? this would make it easier to add additional hosts and reduce the redundancy.

There are some adapters that work without issues, but they generally are not marked as such. I have found that the usb wifi that sony sells for their smart TVs works perfectly, but it is expensive. I also found some at newegg such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833116003 that say they are compatible.

Your problems is from having multiple if statements without closing them. For example with your if statements in lines 93 to 129 you have multiple if statements start and only one ends, I beleive you intended them to be a single statement, if that is the case you will want to use if..elif..fi, so the middle statements would start with elif.

To me it sounds like pulse may be defaulting to the hdmi output, there is a good discussion on the mint forums at http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=117247 in which they have helped people to track down and resolve hdmi audio and auto-mute audio issues, I highly recommend for you to check it out and see if any of those solutions can resolve your problem.

It looks like you want more advanced functionality out of your synaptics touchpad, a basic explanation of configuration items can be found at http://askubuntu.com/questions/82740/help-configuring-synaptics-touchpad , I also have saved the configuration file that I use for my CR-48 chromebook running slackware at which includes comments for most options at http://pastebin.com/bmETqb9k , you can use that as a base for your configuration.