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Learning Docker

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Docker is a next-generation platform for simplifying application containerization life-cycle. Docker allows you to create a robust and resilient environment in which you can generate portable, composable, scalable, and stable application containers.

This book is a step-by-step guide that will walk you through the various features of Docker from Docker software installation to the impenetrable security of containers. The book starts off by elucidating the installation procedure for Docker and a few troubleshooting techniques. You will be introduced to the process of downloading Docker images and running them as containers. You'll learn how to run containers as a service (CaaS) and also discover how to share data among containers. Later on, you'll explore how to establish the link between containers and orchestrate containers using Docker Compose. You will also come across relevant details about application testing inside a container. You will discover how to debug a container using the docker exec command and the nsenter tool. Finally, you will learn how to secure your containers with SELinux and other proven methods.

240 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 2015

6 people are currently reading
24 people want to read

About the author

Pethuru Raj

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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Profile Image for Lanżanka.
110 reviews
August 28, 2017
This book could be much shorter. It had many unnecessary sentences like:


It is an undisputable truth that a set of best practices always plays an indispensable role in elevating any new technology.


and many grammatical and stylistic errors like:


The ONBUILD instruction registers a build instruction to an image and this is triggered when another image is built by using this image as its base image.


All the information can be found in Docker documentation. I just flipped through that book.
223 reviews14 followers
February 26, 2017
This is actually a very good book about Docker, at the moment of writing the book is still relevant and covers a broad set of topics. Needless to say that due to the limited amount of pages it can only scratch the surface on certain topics, but as the title suggests the books wants to give an introduction to docker, not act as a full reference. And it does a good job in offering the introduction.

Personally I found that 2nd half of the book a bit less than the first part, mainly because the topics covered require more attention to truly grasp than explained in the book.
Profile Image for Francois Begin.
14 reviews
January 5, 2018
Yes, the author's prose can be at times florid, but this is just a minor flaw. If you can get past the style, this book is a good choice for busy IT professionals looking for a short technical book to get acquainted with Docker technology.
1 review
May 16, 2018
Unfortunately the content is obsolete today but it happens often to IT books.
What really bad is the lengthy prose that makes it difficult to focus on the technicalities. Still useful for some degree.
Profile Image for Bartek.
72 reviews12 followers
July 16, 2017
Good introduction to Docker for beginners but many elements are outdated. If you would like to read this book you need to take care and verify information from book in official docker documentation
Profile Image for Jascha.
151 reviews
December 7, 2015
At the beginning of November 2015, Docker 1.9 was released and with it multi-host networking was introduced. At the same time, Swarm finally reached a stable state that guaranteed it the label of production-ready. The DockerCon that took place in Barcelona was a success, confirming 2015 has been a great year for that blue whale. The strong impact containers had on the IT world is reflected on the one hand by the many companies investing on it, and on the other by the humongous amount of blog posts and books dedicated to it. In a scenario where some must-have title has already been released (see the bottom for suggested titles), Learning Docker places itself as an introductory text that targets professionals and enthusiasts interested in getting a quick taste of this new technology.

Docker is one of those technologies that I am particularly interested in. I have been reading a lot about it, from the official documentation up to blogs, passing through that horde of books that made it up to the Amazon’s shelves. Getting through these 200 pages took me less than two days, mainly because none of the topics covered was new to me. But let’s dive into it!

The very first thing that I have noticed about this title is the complete lack of background about what Docker is and, mainly, how it works under the hood. I did not find a single paragraph describing what a union mount is. Union mounts are one of the many key concepts of Docker that are not explained at all. Another concept that is not explained at all is, for example, that of the build context. Mind, the term build context appears all over the book, but the reader is not told what it is. The examples that show how to build an image use it without making it clear that the build context is that lone dot at the very end of the command. Concepts such as name spaces and cgroups are, instead, briefly described at the very end of the book, in the chapter dedicated to security.

Another thing I did not appreciate much is the quality of the diagrams used to present the concepts being explained. They are colorful yes, but they could have been definitely better. But diagrams apart, do we really need screenshots to guide us through the signup form of the Docker Hub?

The examples presented by the authors are very simple. Throughout the book there is not a single real-world example, nothing that gets beyond the containers’ equivalent of an Hello World! in C. Still, this is a very beginners’ book. This also means that topics such as Kubernetes or Mesos are not touched at all.

Tying it all up, a very beginners’ book that I did not like but that someone completely new to the subject could find easy to read to get started. Still, the book can’t keep up with the competition: beginners should prefer passing through each and every page of the official documentation and, optionally, Turnbull’s The Docker Book.

Suggested readings:

The Docker Book: an user friendly, concise introduction to Docker. While it does not cover many advanced topics, it’s by far the best covering the basics.
Docker Hands on: while not helpful to beginners, it offers the reader many advanced topics that can’t be found anywhere else.
Docker: Up and Running: a very good text that focuses on advanced topics, mainly containers security.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
23 reviews29 followers
January 24, 2016
I've not had a good experience with books published by Packt in the past and Learning Docker is no exception.

While the content is there, it is not well written. Stripping the book of its unnecessarily wordy nature would make it easier to read and would better expose the meat of the book. As it stands right now it's an irritating read and the entire book is worded like these two painful sentences:

The cloud idea is strongly gripping the IT world to bring in the much-insisted IT infrastructure rationalization, simplification, standardization, automation, and optimization. The abstraction and virtualization concepts, which are the key to the unprecedented success of the cloud paradigm, are penetrating into every kind of IT module.


Many parts of the book are littered with grammatical mistakes that disrupt the flow of the prose, as well as substantial evidence the authors have abused a thesaurus to sound more intelligent. I can't imagine how hard it would be for a non-native speaker to read this book.

The way it has been written makes me wonder whether the authors' first priority was to impress their peers rather than teach the subject matter. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why they needed so many authors in the first place for such a straightforward topic.

This book needed brutally editing by a native English speaker before going to press.
379 reviews10 followers
September 22, 2015
Molto ben fatta la prima parte, in cui spiega le basi.
Un po' troppo fumoso e poco accurato nella parte riguardante i repository.
Poco approfondito nella parte sull'orchestrating.
Peccato, perché era partito bene.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews

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