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