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
In random order:
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; 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
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; 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:
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
- Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., 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
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- 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
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
Here are notes of mine for some of the books
Technical video lectures and courses
Some of these were in-person with exams; others were online learning lectures only. In random order:
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-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)
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- 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 Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
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:
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Pratical AI
- Backend Banter
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Dev Interrupted
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- Modern Mentor
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- Hidden Brain
- Fork Around And Find Out
- Wednesday Wisdom
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Maintainable
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.
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- Java Pub House
- Modern Mentor
- FLOSS weekly
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- Monospace Mentor
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Ruby Weekly
- VK Newsletter
- Changelog News
- The Imperfectionist
- The Valuable Dev
- Register Spill
- byteSizeGo
- Golang Weekly
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
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)
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
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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