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