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