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