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