By 2019 I’d been working with Docker and containers for five years—speaking at conferences, running workshops, training people, and consulting—and in that time I never had a go-to book that I felt 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, and I felt there was a real gap for a book that took a more inclusive approach: welcoming both developers and ops people, and both Linux and Windows users. Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches is the result of me trying to write that book.
Docker is a great technology to learn. It starts with one simple concept: packaging an application together with all its dependencies, so you can run that app in the same way anywhere. That concept makes your applications portable between laptops, datacenters, and clouds, and it breaks down barriers between development and operations teams. It’s the enabler for the major types of IT project organizations are investing in, as you’ll learn in chapter 1, but it’s also a straightforward technology you can learn in your own time.