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...

Technical books

In random order:

Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann

DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly

Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer

21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly

C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;

Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers

Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly

Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing

100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications

Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress

DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible

Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly

Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt

Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders

The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible

Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press

Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press

Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly

The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional

Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional

Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner

Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly

Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy

Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications

Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom;

97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly

Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly

The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley

Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress

Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly

Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press

Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly

Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson

Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School

The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle

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:

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

Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly

Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas

The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press

Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons

The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd

The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK

Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks

The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers

Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley

Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications

Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business

Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business

Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press

Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion

Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House

101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audible

The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate

Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin

Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audible

Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon

Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing

The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge

So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus

Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books

The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books

The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select

The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books

The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite

Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly

The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook

Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus

Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University

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:

Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; 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)

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

Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen

The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online

Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online

AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training

MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training

F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc.

Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online

Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online

Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...;

Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training

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:

Dev Interrupted

Cup o' Go [Golang]

Hidden Brain

Backend Banter

Ship it (Changelog)

Java Pub House

Maintainable

Go Time (Changelog)

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Modern Mentor

Newsletters I like

This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:

Ruby Weekly

The Imperfectionist

The Valuable Dev

Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)

byteSizeGo

VK Newsletter

Golang Weekly

Applied Go Weekly Newsletter

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):

OMIT - Operations Manager IT

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior root user (self-assigned on LinkedIn)

Principal Site Reliability Engineer and Technical Lead

Site Reliability Engineer

Student worker / Studentische Hilfskraft

Systems Engineer Freelancer

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Junior Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator

Co-Founder

(Advanced) Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator

Senior Systems Administrator / Systemadministrator

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