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