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