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:
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- 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
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
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:
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups; Gergely Orosz; Audiobook
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
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:
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); 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
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- 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)
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
Technical guides
These are not whole books, but guides (smaller or larger) which I found very useful. in random order:
- How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
- Raku Guide at https://raku.guide
Podcasts
Podcasts I like
In random order:
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Dev Interrupted
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- Hidden Brain
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- Wednesday Wisdom
- Fork Around And Find Out
- Modern Mentor
- Maintainable
- Pratical AI
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Backend Banter
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.
- Java Pub House
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- FLOSS weekly
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
- Modern Mentor
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- The Imperfectionist
- Register Spill
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Valuable Dev
- byteSizeGo
- Ruby Weekly
- Golang Weekly
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- VK Newsletter
- Changelog News
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
- 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:
- freeX (not published anymore)
- Linux Magazine
- Linux User
- LWN (online only)
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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