Orchestrating Docker Paperback – January 22, 2015

Don't bother with this one. Around half of the examples in the text didn't work - using code from the author, mind you. It's an easy read, but you finish not sure if you really learned anything.

This is one of the worst written book I ever read. If Amazon have zero rating, this book qualify for it. This book written like a high school student just read some Docker tutorial then written some notes. The Internet Available Docker tutorials is much deeper and better articulated than this one.

This book is ok. Mostly repeats official docker docs and tools docs, but have some interesting recipes. Recomeneded to read.

The book gives a good overview of docker. How it works. How to build your own docker images. How to auto-build images by linking github to dockerhub. It gets into basic resource management (disk quota, cpu quota, etc). The section I am on now is about linking containers, the disk of one container to another, or the ip of a container to another. This book has given me a good understanding of how docker works.

It gave me a good insight into how I could use docker at work. Would recommend.

As chapter one already promises with "Unboxing Docker" the whole book is on the same puddle deep level as the same type of videos on youtube.The book contains information on how to install docker and shows the command line arguments with examples.Now If you are a docker newbie you might say: Wow thats perfect! I am going to buy this. But wait don't do it.For a newbie it is more important to understand the concept of docker. Eg. what are the layers what is PID 1 in docker context. What happens behind the scene if you hit "docker run ubuntu bash". There is absolutely no explanation on what happens when or how it is working together. It is just a bunch of commands without explanation or even the intention of an explanation. It just wastes pages on describing the command line flags that are copied from the man pages of docker.The chapters are not connected to each other. You can start reading backwards and it makes as much (non) sense as reading it forward. The only reason to have this book is to use it as a reference, but then I would recommend the official documentation on docs.docker.com because it has more and detailed information and is up to date.

Docker has undoubtely been one of the key technologies of this 2015. This deserved spotlight resulted in many companies, ranging from huge giants up to hordes of start-ups, investing on it, slowly trying to move their microservices to containers. This also resulted in a huge spike in the demand of professionals able not only to create and deploy images, but also to get complex distributed systems based on containers up and running, working in synergy. While the basic concepts are well covered, both by the official documentation and the many titles that were released this and last year, experienced users are suffering the lack of material covering mid to advanced topics, such as orchestration. With such a title, Orchestrating Docker definitely looks appealing to any DevOps that is seriously interested in deploying and managing complex distributed solutions through containers. Unfortunately, it delivers nothing of that it promises.I must confess that I was very excited about this book: Mesos, Terraform, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Consul. Like most of the people that had this title on their hands, I was really looking forward to get some serious material about deploying and maintaining some serious self-jealing distributed environment based on containers. The technologies are getting mature and ready for this step. We just need documentation. And some training. Unfortunately, despite the title, this book does not cover at all any of this. But let's dive a little into the details.Orchestrating Docker is a two hundred pages book, distributed through five chapters. Quite a thin book yes, but two hundred pages can deliver a lot if they are filled with the right quality of content. After a quick first chapter, that chit chats about several topics, including OpenStack, the author takes us into a long review of each and every command supported by the Docker daemon and through which we are magically able to create and run containers. Yay! A couple of notes on this: first of all, this does not provide anything that the official documentation doesn't already. But official documentation apart, there are other introductiory texts that are both more exhaustive and user-friendly. And second, wasn't this a book about orchestration? That is, wasn't it supposed to be about an advanced topic, suggesting the basics were already known to the public?There is not really much more to say about it. The other chapters briefly touch the topics of security. I must honestly admit that keywords like Consul and etcs do indeed appear throughout the book, but the lines dedicated to them are less than five. Technologies such as Apache Mesos, Kubernetes and Terraform are not even mentioned.Overall, a misleading title. But even if the title were correct, as an introduction to Docker the book does not deliver. There are by far better choices available. I still have a doubt though: how could this title have so many five stars reviews immediately after its release? Not really worth it, DevOps.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!