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