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
Learn DevOps & Cloud with the DevOps & Cloud tutorials and online courses.
The gap between code that runs on your laptop and code that runs for other people is where most self-taught developers get stuck. Version control, containers, orchestration, pipelines, the shell — none of it is glamorous, and all of it is what separates a project from a product.
We have four tutorials on this shelf. That isn't enough, and we'd rather say so on the way in than pretend otherwise.
Learn Git Branching is the one we keep recommending to people who've used Git for years and still don't trust it. You type real commands and watch the commit graph move — branching, rebase and remotes across seven level sequences, and it takes an evening. After that, The Missing Semester of Your CS Education from MIT CSAIL covers everything a degree skips: the shell, your dev environment, debugging, Git internals, packaging, code quality. It's the highest-value entry here by a distance.
Docker's own Get Started Guide is deliberately narrow — install, run a container, build an image, push it to Docker Hub — and it's shaped around Docker Desktop, which matters if you're working on a remote Linux box. The Kubernetes Basics tutorial from CNCF runs six modules on Minikube: create a cluster, deploy, expose, scale, roll out an update. Don't start here. Kubernetes makes sense as an answer to a problem you've already had, and it's incoherent as a first lesson.
Almost everything, honestly. There's no AWS, Azure or GCP tutorial on this site, which makes the word "Cloud" in the heading a promise we don't currently keep. Nothing on CI/CD or GitHub Actions. Nothing on Terraform or infrastructure as code. Nothing on Linux administration, monitoring, logging or incident response. The Missing Semester's lecture list has also shifted since the 2020 recordings, so the video order won't always match what you see.
Four tutorials, and two of them are really about Git and the shell rather than deployment. Take those two — they'll pay for themselves this month — and treat the container material as a preview. For cloud certifications and pipelines you'll need to look elsewhere 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.