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