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...
.--. .---. .-.
.---|--| .-. | A | .---. |~| .--.
.--|===|Go|---|_|--.__| S |--|:::| |~|-==-|==|---.
|%%|Lin|la|===| |~~|%%| C |--| |_|~|Perl| |___|-.
| |ux |ng|===| |==| | I | |k8s|=| | 7 |Ra|---|=|
| | | | |_|__| | I |__| | | | |ku|___| |
|~~|===|--|===|~|~~|%%|~~~|--|:::|=|~|----|==|---|=|
^--^---'--^---^-^--^--^---'--^---^-^-^-==-^--^---^-'hjw
Table of contents
=================
Resources
Technical books
Technical references
Self-development and soft-skills books
Technical video lectures and courses
Technical guides
Podcasts I like
Newsletters I like
Formal education
Job titles I had
Technical books
In random order:
- Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
- The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
- Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
- Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
- 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
- Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
- Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
- The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
- Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
- Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
- Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers
- Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
- Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
- Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
- Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
- Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
- DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
- Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
- DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
- Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
- C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
- The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
- Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
- Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;
- Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
- 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
- Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
- 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
- Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
- Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt
- Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
- Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
- 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
- Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
- Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
- Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
- The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
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
- Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
- Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
- BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
- The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press
- Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
Self-development and soft-skills books
In random order:
- Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
- Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
- Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
- Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
- The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books
- Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
- 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audible
- Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
- The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
- Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
- Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University
- Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
- Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
- So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
- Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audible
- The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
- Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
- The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
- Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
- The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
- 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
- The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
- The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
- The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
- Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing
- Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
- Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
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:
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; 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
- The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
- Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 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)
- Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
- F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.
- Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
- Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
- Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
- Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
- MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
- AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training
- Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
- 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:
- Raku Guide at https://raku.guide
- Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
Podcasts I like
In random order:
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Maintainable
- Cup o' Go [Golang]
- Go Time (Changelog)
- Modern Mentor
- Ship it (Changelog)
- Dev Interrupted
- Java Pub House
- Hidden Brain
- Backend Banter
Newsletters I like
This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:
- VK Newsletter
- Register Spill
- The Imperfectionist
- Golang Weekly
- Ruby Weekly
- Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
- The Valuable Dev
- byteSizeGo
- Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
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!)
Job titles I had
Those were my titles (in random order):
- Senior Site Reliability Engineer
- Staff Site Reliability Engineer
- Junior Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator
- Senior Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator
- Student worker / Studentische Hilfskraft
- Co-Founder
- Site Reliability Engineer
- OMIT - Operations Manager IT
- Senior root user (self-assigned on LinkedIn)
- Principal Site Reliability Engineer and Technical Lead
- (Advanced) Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator
- Principal Site Reliability Engineer
- Systems Engineer Freelancer
Go back to the main site