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