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)
* [⇢ ⇢ YouTube channels](#youtube-channels)
* [⇢ Formal education](#formal-education)

## Technical books

In random order:

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

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

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

[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:

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

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

## Podcasts

### Podcasts I like

In random order:

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

* FLOSS weekly
* Modern Mentor
* Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
* 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:

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

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

## YouTube channels

* Jo Van Eyck - A lot about AI in Software Engineering
* The Linux Experiment - Nice to watch to relax and learn about Linux news

# 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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