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