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