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