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