preface

The first edition of this book was released in 2020. By then, I’d been working with Docker and containers for six years—speaking at conferences, running workshops, training people and consulting—and in that time, I never had a go-to book that I could recommend to every audience. There are some very good Docker books out there, but they assume a certain background or a certain technology stack, which left a real gap for a book that took a more inclusive approach that welcomed both developers and operations people, and both Linux and Windows users. Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches is my idea of that book.

Roll on five years, and Docker is the ubiquitous technology its creators hoped it would be. It’s the cornerstone for building applications that run efficiently, start quickly, scale automatically, and can run on any number of different platforms. But as more and more people have experience with containers, the need for a good book is even greater. In my training courses, the most common situation I hear from students is that they’ve worked with Docker a bit on different projects, but they never had the time to stop and learn it properly.