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