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:
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- 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
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- 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
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
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
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- 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
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
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:
- Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 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)
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
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
- How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
Podcasts
Podcasts I like
In random order:
- Wednesday Wisdom
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- Maintainable
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- Pratical AI
- Hidden Brain
- Backend Banter
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Fork Around And Find Out
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Dev Interrupted
- Modern Mentor
- The Pragmatic Engineer 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.
- Java Pub House
- Modern Mentor
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
- FLOSS weekly
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- 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 Pragmatic Engineer
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- Changelog News
- Ruby Weekly
- VK Newsletter
- Register Spill
- byteSizeGo
- Golang Weekly
- Monospace Mentor
- The Imperfectionist
- The Valuable Dev
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 Magazine
- LWN (online only)
- Linux User
- freeX (not published anymore)
YouTube channels
- Jo Van Eyck - A lot about AI in Software Engineering
- The Linux Experiment - Nice to watch to relax and learn about Linux news
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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