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