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