These are mostly learning resources rather than certifications....
For backend engineering specific, some free & paid resources are
- O'Reilly Membership - This is a gold mine. For the $400 I believe you can purchase a yearly membership, where you get access to the entire O'Reilly catalogue. Designing Data Intensive Applications is included of course. They also have some video courses & conference talks in addition to the books. If you don't want to spend the $400 then they also offer a 7 day trial and don't ask for a credit card....
- quastor.org is a good read (but it's free). They follow all the big tech engineering blogs and send summaries of the interesting backend-dev blog posts.
- bytebytego - this is also free. It's mostly diagrams and provides a very high level overview but it's a good subscription. You can also purchase their books on their website.
- LeetCode membership - good for interview prep if you're looking for a FAANG-job, pretty much useless for everything else (could be helpful if you like competitive coding though!).
- Udemy Courses by Hussein Nasser - I really liked his course on databases. Delves into the different database engines, tradeoffs, query optimization, etc. He also has a YouTube channel with lots of free content.
- codecrafters - I haven't done this myself but it's a bunch of interesting challenges where you build a toy version of Redis, build a bittorrent client, build a toy version of Git, etc. Could be useful to understand how tech works. In terms of a free version, there's also (https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x) which is a collection of blog posts where you're building different things in various languages.
I've had mine for 2 years and have noticed in the past 6 mos or so, the rate of added books is really slowing down to a trickle. I used to check every day to see whats news, now I'm checking once a week. I'm waiting on stuff that was published months ago to show up in their catalog. I'm wondering if the other publishers (Manning, etc) are focusing on their own platforms. But its the only place to get the O'Reilly books.
For backend engineering specific, some free & paid resources are
- O'Reilly Membership - This is a gold mine. For the $400 I believe you can purchase a yearly membership, where you get access to the entire O'Reilly catalogue. Designing Data Intensive Applications is included of course. They also have some video courses & conference talks in addition to the books. If you don't want to spend the $400 then they also offer a 7 day trial and don't ask for a credit card....
- quastor.org is a good read (but it's free). They follow all the big tech engineering blogs and send summaries of the interesting backend-dev blog posts.
- bytebytego - this is also free. It's mostly diagrams and provides a very high level overview but it's a good subscription. You can also purchase their books on their website.
- LeetCode membership - good for interview prep if you're looking for a FAANG-job, pretty much useless for everything else (could be helpful if you like competitive coding though!).
- Udemy Courses by Hussein Nasser - I really liked his course on databases. Delves into the different database engines, tradeoffs, query optimization, etc. He also has a YouTube channel with lots of free content.
- codecrafters - I haven't done this myself but it's a bunch of interesting challenges where you build a toy version of Redis, build a bittorrent client, build a toy version of Git, etc. Could be useful to understand how tech works. In terms of a free version, there's also (https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x) which is a collection of blog posts where you're building different things in various languages.