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