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

* [⇢ ⇢ 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](#podcasts)
* [⇢ ⇢ ⇢ Podcasts I like](#podcasts-i-like)
* [⇢ ⇢ ⇢ Podcasts I liked](#podcasts-i-liked)
* [⇢ ⇢ Newsletters I like](#newsletters-i-like)
* [⇢ ⇢ Magazines I like(d)](#magazines-i-liked)
* [⇢ Formal education](#formal-education)

## Technical books

In random order:

* Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
* Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
* Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
* Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
* DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
* DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
* Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
* The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
* Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
* Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
* Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
* Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
* Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
* Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
* Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
* The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
* Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
* Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
* Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
* Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
* The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
* Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
* The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
* Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
* Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers 
* The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
* Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
* 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
* Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom; 
* Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
* Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
* Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
* Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt 
* Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
* 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
* 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
* Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
* Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
* Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
* Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
* Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
* The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
* Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
* 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
* Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
* Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
* Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
* C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;

## 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:

* Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
* Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
* Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
* Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
* The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press 
* Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
* BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
* Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

* Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
* The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
* Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
* Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
* The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
* The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
* So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
* Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
* Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
* Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University  
* The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
* Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
* Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
* Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
* The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
* Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
* The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
* The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups; Gergely Orosz; Audiobook 
* 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
* The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
* 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
* Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
* Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
* Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
* Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
* The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
* Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
* Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
* Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
* The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
* Getting Things Done; David Allen
* Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
* Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
* Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
* The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
* Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
* The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
* Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne

[Here are notes of mine for some of the books](../notes/index.md)  

## 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. 
* 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)
* Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
* Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
* 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
* Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
* The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
* Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
* Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
* Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
* MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
* Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
* 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:

* How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
* Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide 
* Raku Guide at https://raku.guide  

## Podcasts

### Podcasts I like

In random order:

* Hidden Brain
* The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
* Cup o' Go [Golang]
* Fork Around And Find Out
* BSD Now [BSD]
* Backend Banter
* The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
* Dev Interrupted
* Pratical AI
* Maintainable
* Deep Questions with Cal Newport
* Modern Mentor
* The Changelog Podcast(s)
* Wednesday Wisdom
* 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)
* FLOSS weekly
* Java Pub House
* Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
* Modern Mentor
* CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]

## Newsletters I like

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

* The Valuable Dev
* The Pragmatic Engineer
* VK Newsletter
* Register Spill
* Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
* byteSizeGo
* Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
* Golang Weekly
* The Imperfectionist
* Monospace Mentor
* Ruby Weekly
* Changelog News

## 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 Magazine
* LWN (online only)
* Linux User
* freeX (not published anymore)

# 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!)

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