Favorite Things

Here are some of my favorite Linux and Unix distributions. Ubuntu A great introductory Linux OS. KDE Neon A great OS for visual customization. FreeBSD A reliable Unix.

Trakt Automatically track what you’re watching. TrueNAS A great multimedia server OS.

How to Win Friend and Influence People A great book on best-in-class social skills. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1992) A dated but great guide to help understand the habits of different socio-economic classes. Gateway to the Great Books The foundation of a Liberal Arts education. History A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry A look at history and popular culture. Art Myron Barnstone Studios A great resource on drawing. Bob Ross Painting A great resource on oil painting. Education The Closing of the American Mind A book about the 20th century’s education system.

A collection of resources for Software Engineers. Starting Out Overview ACM’s CS Curricula An internationally recognized curricula published every decade. Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Covers the technical and business skills required of a professional Software Engineer. Hard Skills Learn X in Y minutes A great place for a quick overview of a language. The Missing Semester of Your CS Education Review of required technical sophistication. Vim Cheat Sheet A cheat sheet for Vim. Learn to Program How to Design Programs (HTDP) A great introduction to programming. Frankly it should be required for High School HTDP - Istanbul Bilgi University A companion course to HTDP. Stanford Engineering Everywhere Covers 80% of the ACM’s CS Curricula (2013). Programmer Competency Matrix A good overview of skills for a programmer. How to Debug A great article on debugging in 12 steps. Career Development Advice A Forty-Year Career A great article on how to have a successful career in tech. Interview Preparation LeetCode Reviews data structures and algorithms. It is a great place to practice for code interviews. OtherBranch Problem A great example of a coding problem. Job Boards HN: Who is Hiring? A monthly thread on Hacker News where companies post job listings. Exploration Hacker News A great place for interesting discussion. It has a “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” discussion every month. Paul Graham’s Website A great collection of essays. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces A great (open-source) text on Operating Systems. Tools Artistic Style Artistic Style is a source code indenter, formatter, and beautifier for the C, C++, C++/CLI, Objective‑C, C#, and Java programming languages. Doxygen Doxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources.

Here are some resources to help you study more effectively. Practical Skills GNU Typist A free program to learn touch typing. How to Study in College A textbook (by Walter Pauk and Ross J.Q. Owens) with all the study skill you should have been taught in High School. Stanford University’s Student Learning Programs Reaching your academic potential can be challenging, but learning effective habits can make a significant difference. How to Read a Book You cannot read all the books in the world. Thus, it is important to maximize what you get out of books. Getting Things Done A system when a simple TO-DO list no longer works. Memorization Moonwalking with Einstein A story about mental athletics. Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It A great book to understand why we remember some things and forget others. The Memory Book A book full of memory techniques. Grammar English Composition and Grammar: Complete Course A great resource on standard English grammar. Tools The Unix command look Display words beginning with a given prefix. The Unix dictionary A Perl client for accessing network dictionary servers. It contains the Computing Dictionary. LanguageTool A better alternative to Grammarly. GNU Style and Diction diction identifies wordy and commonly misused phrases. style analyzes surface characteristics of a document, including sentence length and other readability measures. ...

The Boron Letters A great book on copywriting that provided me insight into why ad-tech is in demand.

Personal Finance The Richest Man in Babylon A great book on the importance of savings. Get Rich Slowly (1992) A book to get an overview of the stock market. The Bogleheads’ Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio A moderately conservative investment strategy and its reasoning.

Coaching Olympic Style Boxing (1994) The best Boxing book for both Coaches and Fighters. Convict Conditioning by Paul “Coach” Wade An excellent training guide on body weight conditioning.

Resources related to IT Operations or System Administration. Ops School Learn IT Operation skill sets from beginner to expert. XCP-ng Turnkey server virtualization. A non-Citrix fork of XenServer.