The First Book of Docker

The First Book of Docker was one of the earliest systematic technical primers on Docker in the Chinese-speaking world, translated from the book of the same name by Australian technical author James Turnbull. The author, a former Vice President of Services and Support at Docker, had long written about system administration, configuration management, and operations tooling. The book therefore reflects an operations-oriented view of container practice: rather than piling up abstractions, it unfolds step by step around real scenarios. The content broadly follows a sequence of understanding, installing, getting started, advancing, and putting into practice. It first explains what Docker is, what components it comprises, and what problems it solves; then covers installing and configuring Docker on Linux; and then moves into core operations such as images, containers, and repositories, including pulling, building, and layer management of images, and everyday actions such as creating, starting, and stopping containers and viewing logs. On that foundation, the book places Docker within the development workflow: how to use containers to build reproducible test environments for new projects, how to integrate Docker into continuous integration workflows such as Jenkins, how to dockerize existing applications, and how to orchestrate multiple containers into a complete, runnable application stack. A sample application built on Node.js and Redis runs through the book, demonstrating the progression from a single container to multiple containers, and the final chapters introduce Docker's remote API and ideas for extension, helping readers understand the tooling and process issues they will encounter as containers move from testing to production. Because the Chinese edition was published some time ago, some commands and orchestration tools in the book (such as the early orchestration chapter using Fig, and older installation methods) have changed considerably today. Readers should focus on the conceptual model and workflow thinking, and refer to current official documentation for specific commands.