path: root/about/resources.md

# 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

* [⇢ Resources](#resources)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical books](#technical-books)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical references](#technical-references)
* [⇢ ⇢ Self-development and soft-skills books](#self-development-and-soft-skills-books)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical video lectures and courses](#technical-video-lectures-and-courses)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical guides](#technical-guides)
* [⇢ ⇢ Podcasts I like](#podcasts-i-like)
* [⇢ ⇢ Newsletters I like](#newsletters-i-like)
* [⇢ Formal education](#formal-education)

## Technical books

In random order:

* Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
* Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
* DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
* Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
* Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
* Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
* 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
* 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
* Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
* Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
* Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; 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
* Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
* Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
* Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
* C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
* Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
* The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
* Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
* DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
* Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
* Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom; 
* Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
* Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
* Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
* 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 Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
* Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
* Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
* Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
* Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
* Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
* Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
* Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
* Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
* 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
* Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers 
* Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
* Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; 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
* Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
* The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press 
* BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
* Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
* Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

* Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
* Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University  
* The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
* Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
* The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
* So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
* Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
* Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audible
* 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
* Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
* The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books
* The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
* Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
* Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
* Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion 
* The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
* The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
* The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
* The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
* The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
* Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
* Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
* Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
* 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audible
* Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
* Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
* The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
* Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
* Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press

[Here are notes of mine for some of the books (HTTP)](https://foo.zone/notes/index.html)  
[Here are notes of mine for some of the books (Gemini)](gemini://foo.zone/notes/index.gmi)  

## Technical video lectures and courses

Some of these were in-person with exams; others were online learning lectures only. In random order:

* The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
* Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
* AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training 
* Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
* Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
* Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
* The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
* Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
* Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...; 
* 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
* Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
* F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc. 
* Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
* Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
* Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen

## 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 

## Podcasts I like

In random order:

* Backend Banter
* Modern Mentor
* Cup o' Go [Golang]
* Ship it (Changelog) 
* Hidden Brain
* Deep Questions with Cal Newport
* Java Pub House
* Dev Interrupted
* Maintainable
* Go Time (Changelog)

## Newsletters I like

This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:

* byteSizeGo
* VK Newsletter
* Register Spill
* Ruby Weekly
* The Imperfectionist
* Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
* The Valuable Dev
* Golang Weekly
* Applied Go Weekly Newsletter

# Formal education

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](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](./)