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