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