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