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