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