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