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