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...
.--. .---. .-.
.---|--| .-. | A | .---. |~| .--.
.--|===|Go|---|_|--.__| S |--|:::| |~|-==-|==|---.
|%%|Lin|la|===| |~~|%%| C |--| |_|~|Perl| |___|-.
| |ux |ng|===| |==| | I | |k8s|=| | 7 |Ra|---|=|
| | | | |_|__| | I |__| | | | |ku|___| |
|~~|===|--|===|~|~~|%%|~~~|--|:::|=|~|----|==|---|=|
^--^---'--^---^-^--^--^---'--^---^-^-^-==-^--^---^-'hjw
Table of Contents
Technical books
In random order:
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- 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
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
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
- Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
- Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
- Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
- Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
- Getting Things Done; David Allen
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
- Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
- The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
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:
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-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)
- Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; 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
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
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:
- Maintainable
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Backend Banter
- Dev Interrupted
- Hidden Brain
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Fork Around And Find Out
- Fallthrough [Golang]
- Pratical AI
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- BSD Now [BSD]
- Modern Mentor
- The Changelog Podcast(s)
- The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
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.
- Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
- Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)
- CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
- FLOSS weekly
- 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:
- byteSizeGo
- Register Spill
- Golang Weekly
- Monospace Mentor
- The Valuable Dev
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Changelog News
- VK Newsletter
- Ruby Weekly
- The Imperfectionist
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
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)
- Linux Magazine
- Linux User
- LWN (online only)
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!)
Go back