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:
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- 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
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- 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
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts;Emily Freeman, Nathen Harvey; O'Reilly
- Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
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:
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- 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
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- As a Man Thinketh, James Allen, Project Gutenberg
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups; Gergely Orosz; Audiobook
- 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
- [german]: Positiv wirkt - Wie du mit positivem Denken und Handeln aktiv dein Leben gestaltest; Armin Schubert; BusinessVillage
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
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:
- 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)
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
- Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- 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:
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
- Raku Guide at https://raku.guide
- How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
Podcasts
Podcasts I like
In random order:
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Hidden Brain
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Modern Mentor
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- Backend Banter
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Beyond Coding
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- Maintainable
- Wednesday Wisdom
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- Pratical AI
- Dev Interrupted
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
- 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)
- Java Pub House
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- FLOSS weekly
- Modern Mentor
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Valuable Dev
- byteSizeGo
- Ruby Weekly
- Monospace Mentor
- Golang Weekly
- The Imperfectionist
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Register Spill
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
- 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)
- LWN (online only)
- Linux Magazine
- Linux User
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
Individual videos
"Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey
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://github.com/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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