DEV Community

Cover image for Book review : A Developer’s Essential Guide to Docker Compose
Massimo Bonanni
Massimo Bonanni

Posted on

Book review : A Developer’s Essential Guide to Docker Compose

The book cover

Docker and Docker Compose are two fundamental tools in the modern development ecosystem, and to be able to run your solution in different cloud providers, containers are strategically important. For this reason, knowing these two tools become very important.
This book is all about Docker Compose, and it does it remarkably well.

The book is made up of three parts, each of which is useful for understanding not only how to use the tool but also how to do it in working environments.
in the first part, the author deals with the fundamentals of Docker Compose. This part can certainly be useful for those who approach the topic and need to understand the basics, but it can also be useful for those who need a guide to consult daily.
I found the chapter on networking and volumes really well done. These two topics are always very delicate and difficult to understand, but in this part, they are clear and well-explained.
I want to clarify that it is, in any case, an introductory chapter but allows you to fix the topics so that you can then go and address them in detail in the documentation.
In general, if you are already an expert on the topic, this first part can serve as a very useful refresher but it is not meant for you.

The second part of the book is dedicated to the daily work with the tool and examines those aspects with which the developer has to do every day (monitoring, combining multiple docker-compose files, simulating a local environment, and so on). Unfortunately, for those who work with Azure, the chapter relating to the simulation of a local environment is designed for AWS services. In this part, you can find a whole chapter dedicated to CI/CD pipelines where GitHub, Bitbucket, and Travis (no Azure DevOps pipelines) are examined as CI/CD platforms. Well done and useful chapter.
The third part is dedicated to deployment: remote hosts, AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes.

In conclusion, it is a well-written book, and, although the topic is not the easiest, it is also very smooth and understandable. The interesting aspect is that it can be used by those approaching the instrument but also as a reference guide in daily work.

Oldest comments (0)