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