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:

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

* BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
* Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
* Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
* Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
* 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
* Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

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

[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:

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

* Backend Banter
* BSD Now [BSD]
* Fork Around And Find Out
* Cup o' Go [Golang]
* Pratical AI
* The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
* The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
* Modern Mentor
* Deep Questions with Cal Newport
* Hidden Brain
* Maintainable
* The Changelog Podcast(s)
* Fallthrough [Golang]
* Dev Interrupted
* Wednesday Wisdom

### 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)
* Modern Mentor
* FLOSS weekly
* Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
* CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
* 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
* Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
* Golang Weekly
* Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
* The Valuable Dev
* Changelog News
* Register Spill
* The Imperfectionist
* Monospace Mentor
* byteSizeGo
* The Pragmatic Engineer
* 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:

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

# 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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