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:

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

* Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
* Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
* Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
* Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
* 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
* BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

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

[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:

* The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
* Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
* F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc. 
* 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
* 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)
* Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
* Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
* Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...; 
* Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
* Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; 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
* Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
* MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
* Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online

## 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:

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

### 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.

* Modern Mentor
* Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
* Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
* FLOSS weekly
* Java Pub House
* CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]

## Newsletters I like

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

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

## 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:

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

# 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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