Book Review – Mastering Docker

Packtpub has not the best reputation when it comes to the quality of books and that is for a reason. But there are some really good books as well, I learned Solr using Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server, got more familiar with Spring Boot through Learning Spring Boot and learned some things while reading Hibernate Search by Example and Grade Effective Implementation Guide. That's why I'm trying their books from time to time again, this time when wanting to read a book on Docker, so I got me Mastering Docker by Russ McKendrick during their recent 5$ sale.

When I picked up the book I had already started working with Docker. I wanted to read a book to get a deeper understandig of the technology, to be able to solve future problems but also because I think learning works best during the time you actually use something.

My expectations and needs are somehow met, I learned quite some new things while reading it. The author goes through all the commands and tools and explains how to use them step by step using examples. This is a good thing for some (like docker and docker-compose) but might be a bit too much for others (do we really need screenshots of the my profile screen on Dockerhub?). What I was definitively missing is a deeper look at some of the concepts.

The most interesting parts for me were all the supporting technologies in the ecosystem like Weave and Rancher, including nearly ecstatic reactions ("consul-template can do whaaaaaat?"). I can say the book did its job for me.