The working shelf

Books and gear.

Read the manual. Sometimes the manual is a thousand pages and worth owning.

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Books cover the underlying skills; they are not substitutes for a hosted service or software subscription.

• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, Stevens & Rago

  If you don't own this one, you don't get an opinion on syscalls.

• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, Stevens

  Packet-level truth. No vendor marketing between you and the wire.

• The Linux Programming Interface, Kerrisk

  1500+ pages. Doubles as a doorstop and a personality test for interns.

• The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth

  Own it, don't finish it, threaten juniors with it. That's the deal.

• Design Patterns, Gang of Four

  Yes it's dated. No, your framework didn't invent the Observer pattern.

• The Art of Unix Programming, Raymond

  Philosophy dressed up as a style guide. Read it twice, ten years apart.

• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Arpaci-Dusseau

  Free online. Buy the print anyway; it survives a coffee spill better than a laptop.

• Learning the bash Shell, Newham & Rosenblatt

  The one-liners are downstream of actually understanding the shell. Start here.

• sed & awk, Dougherty & Robbins

  Two tools, one book, thirty years of not being replaced by anything better.

• BPF Performance Tools, Brendan Gregg

  The book on Linux tracing. Every tool from ftrace to bpftrace covered properly.

• Site Reliability Engineering, Google/Beyer et al.

  Error budgets before error budgets were a LinkedIn post topic.

• The Practice of System and Network Administration, Limoncelli et al.

  The operational-tradeoffs book I actually reach for, not the one I pretend to.

• Keychron Q1 Max, hot-swappable mechanical keyboard

  Unnecessary. Loud. I will not be taking questions.

• USB-to-RJ45 console cable

  The tool that separates 'I can fix this' from 'I am now driving to the datacenter.'

• Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB)

  Every homelab starts with good intentions and one of these gathering dust.

• 2-Port HDMI KVM switch

  One keyboard, two boxes, zero patience for unplugging cables like an animal.

• Thunderbolt dock, Satechi CubeDock

  Your laptop has two ports. You have eleven cables. Do the math.

• Learning Go, 2nd Edition, Jon Bodner

  A grounding in idiomatic Go. Check current language-release notes separately.