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...
.--. .---. .-.
.---|--| .-. | A | .---. |~| .--.
.--|===|Go|---|_|--.__| S |--|:::| |~|-==-|==|---.
|%%|Lin|la|===| |~~|%%| C |--| |_|~|Perl| |___|-.
| |ux |ng|===| |==| | I | |k8s|=| | 7 |Ra|---|=|
| | | | |_|__| | I |__| | | | |ku|___| |
|~~|===|--|===|~|~~|%%|~~~|--|:::|=|~|----|==|---|=|
^--^---'--^---^-^--^--^---'--^---^-^-^-==-^--^---^-'hjw
Table of Contents
Technical books
In random order:
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- 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
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
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
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- 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
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- 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; Audiobook
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- 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:
- 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)
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; 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
- Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; 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
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:
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- Backend Banter
- Wednesday Wisdom
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- Hidden Brain
- Dev Interrupted
- Fork Around And Find Out
- Modern Mentor
- Pratical AI
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- Maintainable
- 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.
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- Java Pub House
- FLOSS weekly
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- Modern Mentor
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- byteSizeGo
- Ruby Weekly
- Golang Weekly
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Valuable Dev
- Register Spill
- The Imperfectionist
- Monospace Mentor
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
- Changelog News
- VK 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:
- Linux User
- Linux Magazine
- LWN (online only)
- freeX (not published anymore)
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!)
Go back