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