Resources
This site contains a list of resources I find and found helpful. I am not an expert in all of these topics, but all the resources listed here impacted me. I read some of the books quite a long time ago, so there might be newer editions out there already, and I might need to refresh some of the knowledge.
The list may not be exhaustive, but I will be adding more in the future. I firmly believe that educating yourself further is one of the most important things to advance. The lists are in random order and reshuffled every time (via *sort -R*) when updates are made.
You won't find any links on this site because, over time, the links will break. Please use your favourite search engine when you are interested in one of the resources...
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Table of Contents
Technical books
In random order:
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- The Practise of System and Network Administration; Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, Strata R. Chalup; Addison-Wesley Professional Pro Git; Scott Chacon, Ben Straub; Apress
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
Technical references
I didn't read them from the beginning to the end, but I am using them to look up things. The books are in random order:
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups; Gergely Orosz; Audiobook
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
Here are notes of mine for some of the books
Technical video lectures and courses
Some of these were in-person with exams; others were online learning lectures only. In random order:
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
- Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
- Red Hat Certified System Administrator; Course + certification (Although I had the option, I decided not to take the next course as it is more effective to self learn what I need)
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
Technical guides
These are not whole books, but guides (smaller or larger) which I found very useful. in random order:
- Raku Guide at https://raku.guide
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
- How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
Podcasts
Podcasts I like
In random order:
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Dev Interrupted
- Wednesday Wisdom
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- Maintainable
- Modern Mentor
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Backend Banter
- Pratical AI
- Fork Around And Find Out
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- Hidden Brain
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- Fallthrough [Golang]
Podcasts I liked
I liked them but am not listening to them anymore. The podcasts have either "finished" (no more episodes) or I stopped listening to them due to time constraints or a shift in my interests.
- Modern Mentor
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
- Java Pub House
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- FLOSS weekly
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- byteSizeGo
- The Valuable Dev
- Changelog News
- The Imperfectionist
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
- VK Newsletter
- Ruby Weekly
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- Register Spill
- Golang Weekly
- Monospace Mentor
Magazines I like(d)
This is a mix of tech I like(d). I may not be a current subscriber, but now and then, I buy an issue. In random order:
- LWN (online only)
- Linux Magazine
- Linux User
- freeX (not published anymore)
I have met many self-taught IT professionals I highly respect. In my own opinion, a formal degree does not automatically qualify a person for a particular job. It is more about how you educate yourself further *after* formal education. The pragmatic way of thinking and getting things done do not require a college or university degree.
However, I still believe a degree in Computer Science helps to understand all the theories involved that you would have never learned otherwise. Isn't it cool to understand how compilers work under the hood (automata theory) even if you are not required to hack the compiler in your current position? You could apply the same theory for other things too. This was just *one* example.
- One year Student exchange program in OH, USA
- German School Majors (Abitur), focus areas: German and Mathematics
- Half-year internship as a C/C++ programmer in Sofia, Bulgaria
- Graduated from University as Diplom-Inform. (FH) at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Germany
My diploma thesis, "Object-oriented development of a GUI based tool for event-based simulation of distributed systems," can be found at:
https://codeberg.org/snonux/vs-sim
I was one of the last students handed out an "old fashioned" German Diploma degree before the University switched to the international Bachelor and Master versions. To give you an idea: The "Diplom-Inform. (FH)" means translated "Diploma in Informatics from a University of Applied Sciences (FH: Fachhochschule)". Going after the international student credit score, it can be seen as an equivalent to a "Master in Computer Science" degree.
Colleges and Universities are costly in many countries. Come to Germany, the first college degree is for free (if you finish within a certain deadline!)
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