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