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