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