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