Free
Docker's official four-step introduction — install, run your first container, build an image, push it to Docker Hub. Deliberately narrow, and Desktop-shaped.
Beginner0–2 hours
Nobody gets hired to run Kubernetes on day one. People get hired because they can find out why the build broke, roll back a bad release, and read a log without panicking. The tools change; that posture doesn't.
Four tutorials sit in this category, and their order matters more than usual — starting at the wrong end of this list is the most common way people bounce off operations work.
Job listings say Kubernetes and Terraform. Interviews ask whether you can rebase without destroying a branch, whether you know what a container image actually contains, and how you'd debug something that only fails in staging. Two entries map onto that directly. Learn Git Branching is an interactive visualiser where you type real commands and watch the commit graph respond — branching, rebase, remotes, seven level sequences, one evening. The Missing Semester of Your CS Education from MIT CSAIL covers the shell, dev environments, debugging, Git internals, packaging and code quality, and it's the highest-value thing on this page for anyone who already writes code.
Docker: Get Started Guide is four steps — install, run a container, build an image, push it to Docker Hub. Deliberately narrow, and shaped around Docker Desktop, which is worth knowing if you're working on a remote Linux box. Kubernetes Basics from CNCF runs six modules on Minikube: cluster, deploy, expose, scale, roll out an update. Take it last, and only after you've felt the problem it solves. Learning orchestration before you've deployed anything is memorising answers to a question nobody has asked you.
Half this category is really about Git and the shell rather than operations. There's no CI/CD material at all — no GitHub Actions, no pipelines. No infrastructure as code. No cloud provider, no Linux administration, no monitoring or logging, nothing on incident response. The Missing Semester's lecture list has also changed since the 2020 recordings, so the numbering won't always match.
Git Branching this week, Missing Semester next month, Docker when you need to ship something, Kubernetes when someone asks you to. Plan on learning pipelines and cloud somewhere other than here for now.
Docker's official four-step introduction — install, run your first container, build an image, push it to Docker Hub. Deliberately narrow, and Desktop-shaped.
Kubernetes' official six-module basics tutorial — create a cluster, deploy, expose, scale and roll out an update, run locally on Minikube.
Peter Cottle
Peter Cottle's interactive git visualiser — type real commands, watch the commit graph move. Branching, rebase and remotes across seven level sequences.
MIT's course on the tools degrees skip — shell, dev environment, debugging, Git internals, packaging, code quality. The lecture list has changed since 2020.