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