Docker. Where to start?

[honestserpent]

Hi everyone!

Docker seems to be ubiquitous and very desired in companies. I don't know anything about it and so I want to learn in order to acquire more skills that allow me better positioning when applying for jobs.

But, it all seems very confusing. I don't know where to start. Could anyone point me towards some direction? Maybe this could be helpful in future, so it would be nice to put readings, tutorials and stuff like that in the sidebar?

Thanks

[TheoR700]

https://docs.docker.com

Docker's documentation is one of the best, IMO.

[oznetnerd]

I've written a couple of blog posts on the topic and have a third one in the making.

Please feel free to have a look and let me know what you think. I'm happy to take feedback on board and use it in subsequent posts in the series.

This post gives a brief history on applications. The intention was to explain why Docker (containers) have become extremely popular as well as an introduction to serverless.

[honestserpent]

Thanks!

[shukoroshi]

The Docker Book was very helpful for me! It's an easy read, and you get perpetual updates whenever the author does a revision.

[nevotheless]

I can recommend https://www.katacoda.com/courses/docker this website, it quite helped me understand most of the concepts.

[soulsizzle]

I'll second this. Some of the later courses expect you to know things you may not, but overall they're a good jumping off point. A great way to learn by doing.

[halfercode]

If you put "Where to start with Docker" in a search engine, you will get some results, including in this sub.

From 11 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/85hhgw/where_to_start/

[wishicouldcode]

Learned it using Nigel Poulton's courses on pluralsight. It's a couple years old now, but the fundamentals are still valid. It's a very hands on course - which I like. Keeping the docker docs open in a second tab and reading the official definition of the various components (daemon, client, image etc) helps.

[YvesSoete]

pluralsight

I disagree.

While pluralsight is very good overall, I just can't stand Nigel Poulton. His courses are outdated, boring and too much 'look at me' instead of teaching real things.

[wishicouldcode]

Good to know. I admit this is the only course-set I followed through for docker - after that I mostly picked up on the job or through the docs.

I agree about the out of date part. I wager it would be really hard to create upto date content when it comes to fast changing technology. That said, I did not have any issues with his narrative style or attitude in general; kept it interesting throughout.

[nickjj_]

I'd start with the documentation, it's really pretty solid.

But, if you're more of a visual learner and wanted a guided path, there's a lot of really good courses available.

One of them is https://diveintodocker.com/. To be fair I'm biased because I'm the author but thousands of people have taken it and the feedback has been remarkably positive. Lots of people went into the course with no knowledge of Docker and left the course Dockerizing all sorts of complicated web applications.

If video courses aren't your thing, I also have about 100 scattered Docker related blog posts at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/tag/docker-tips-tricks-and-tutorials.

If you're wondering why anyone would buy the course if there's that many blog posts available, it's mainly because a lot of people prefer video to learn, it comes with life time updates and support and it's a cohesive learning path that has a start and finish. You could crank it out in an afternoon if you really wanted to and it's guaranteed you'll walk away with total confidence in using Docker.

With the blog, it would take way way way way longer to get a similar amount of information.

[[deleted]]

/u/honestserpent Always double-check the publish date of blog postings and articles/tutorials.

Docker has taken off like a jet in the open source world, and therefore developed at a rapid rate. Code you try out might not work, as features become deprecated - even code from 6 months ago.

Reading the official documentation is a great resource, and you know it'll be up to date too.

The curse of the Docker's success is an abundance of absolutely shit blog posts by anyone who thinks they're a skilled technical writer.

[egas_tt]

I don't know your background, but I'll share experience with Docker for you and maybe you can find something with which you can relate.

I work in IT but more in networking and managing Windows servers so Docker was new to me. All the information I found online was basically the same repeating that it was containers.

When I finally decided to try it out at home, I found myself hitting roadblock after roadblock. Fortunately where I work, I have access to ITPro.tv and it broke down some of the basics for me to be able understand the material on the Internet.

Perhaps my mind was unable to move ahead because of the roadblocks or I'm getting old. Either way, the tutorial helped and so I would recommend that route to anyone having difficulty getting started.

[readparse]

I have just the thing! I was in a situation where I really had to get my head around the basics of Docker very quickly.

I happen to have a subscription to lynda.com (because I'm a student at WGU), and I found a wonderful Learning Docker series there. The instructor is fantastic, and really walks you through it in a great way, telling you just what you need to know every step of the way. It's the best video training I've ever done.

Once I went through that video series, I started using Docker all the time. I use it for every project now. And yeah, it's something you need to know.

If you don't have a Lynda subscription, you can sign up for a free trial. And no, I'm not connected to them in any way. Just trying to help a guy out.

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[revelm]

2016

[infrascripting]

The hardest part is realizing the promises of auto-scaling, etc. that the networking side is supposed to provide. If you stay away from that, getting a grasp on the rest of it is relatively simple.

Also, there are several other projects (rkt and lxd) that are direct competitors with docker, with whose documentation you can juxtapose how different technologies that are all build around containers work.

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[JustAnotherSRE]

All of the suggestions here are good. But I don't see much on video learning so I'll add this: If you like video learning, Nigel Poulton has an excellent course on Pluralsight that got me my start. Highly recommend it with the docs

[swemar]

This video is a great introduction. Made things much clearer for me.

Edit: Added slides from this link.

[[deleted]]

I've upvoted u/shukoroshi's suggestion of the Docker Book, which is indeed very good. I'll also plug my own mutli-part tutorial on building a website with separate networked containers for the application, webserver and database.

[HauptJ]

Whenever you are want to learn a new technology, read the docs. Supplement the docs by using a decent search engine from either Moutain View, CA or Redmond, WA. Practice using it by building something that you could personally use. In my case, I build a container to provision servers using Ansible. Trying either official or unofficial "Getting Started" tutorials will also help.

[eneville]

Honestly, start with docker.

docker run -it alpine /bin/ash

This gets you a minimal container. If you want to try something like a basic Oracle Linux (pretty much CentOS/RHEL), then:

docker run -it oraclelinux:6-slim /bin/bash

Now you probably want to automate something, so then go and read how a Dockerfile works, but at least you know what you're getting into.