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:

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

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

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

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

## 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
* Raku Guide at https://raku.guide  
* Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide 

## Podcasts

### Podcasts I like

In random order:

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

### 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.

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

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

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

[Go back](./)