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