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