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