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