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