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