Elton Stoneman

The Claude suite of LLM-powered tools and agents from Anthropic has radiacally–and permanently–changed the way technical professionals design and create software. From agentic code generation to assistants that capture and execute specifications, assist with architectural and visual design, automate testing, and much more, Claude is a hyper-productive working partner. Claude at Work teaches you how to seamlessly step into your new role as AI agent manager, turning Claude’s tools and models into a full DevOps team and ensuring you stay in full control of the process.

In this practical book written for busy software engineers with responsibilities along the full SDLC, you'll build a collaborative workspace application—similar to a hybrid of Slack and Figma—that expands in scope as you progress. As you explore this collaborative AI workflow, you’ll discover how to leverage Claude Cowork to securely access and edit files directly in your project directories. When you scale the system, you’ll see how to direct Claude Code on parallel workstreams, focusing your time on task design, validation, and architectural approvals.

As you progress, you’ll put Claude to work designing architecture and components. Everything you’ll do is grounded in established software engineering fundamentals, including behavior-driven development, test-driven development, and rigorous documentation, so you can seamlessly connect new AI techniques to your existing team workflows. You’ll see how to write reusable skills to automate repetitive administrative tasks, how to maintain a healthy skepticism toward AI-generated output, and how to manage the real-world token costs of running agent sessions.

You’ll even find practical exercises that empower you to build custom AI agents that serve as an autonomous operations team. These specialized agents run alongside your application in production to deploy, monitor, and repair live systems, while you learn exactly how the platform’s internal safeguards work to prevent rogue activity.

Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition teaches you the most important Docker techniques in just 22 short hands-on lessons. Each chapter guides you through an essential concept, complete with a self-contained lab to practice your new skill. You’ll explore building Docker apps, adding observability, running databases in containers, safely migrating legacy systems, and more. There’s even a primer on using Kubernetes to manage your containers!

In this liveProject series, you’ll deploy an existing web application to Kubernetes. Take on the role of a new DevOps engineer for IoT company Widgetario, which makes IoT devices and components for home automation systems. You’ve been given the job of taking its existing web platform and deploying it to Kubernetes. Each project in this series addresses a different stage of the process, bringing you from basic app configuration to setting up a production-grade Kubernetes environment.

In this liveProject, you’ll improve on half-finished legacy work to add security, logging, and centralized monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster. Picking up where a previous employee left off, you’ll implement the final requirements of a Kubernetes application so that it’s ready to go live. You’ll establish secure access for testers and SREs, set up log collection and storage with the EFK stack, and deploy and configure the Prometheus tool to collect metrics from all the application components. Finally, you’ll set up an HTTP certificate and an ingress controller to listen for incoming traffic so it can be routed to your company’s domain. When you’re finished, you’ll be ready to flip the switch and set your application live!

In this liveProject, you’ll go hands-on to build an automated CI/CD pipeline for a Kubernetes-based application so your team can roll out new releases whenever there’s a new feature to go live. The pipeline you build will use the same process to make updates to the application platforms. You’ll work with a pre-deployed and working version of an application as you use Helm to create a single deployment package for all environments, configure safe automated deployments, and use affinity rules and selectors to prepare for high availability.

In this liveProject, you’ll properly configure a Kubernetes app so that it’s secure and resilient in production. Working with a previously deployed application, you’ll set up the app to read configuration settings from the cluster so you can use the same Docker images in test and production. Extend your app’s specifications to activate Kubernetes’s self-healing, defend against attackers with security controls, and run a replicated database in containers. Once you’re finished, you’ll have a securely deployed demo app that’s resilient against whatever production throws at it.

In this liveProject, you’ll take an existing application and model it in Kubernetes. You’ll work with a prepackaged application for IoT company Widgetario to explore the core concepts of Kubernetes such as Pods and Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and Secrets. You’ll complete common tasks like routing network traffic, performing application updates, and configuring the app to run with high availability and scale. This project will ground you in the best practices of deploying an app to Kubernetes, with a fully working demo that can run with high availability and scale.

Learn Kubernetes in a Month of Lunches is your guide to getting up and running with Kubernetes. You'll progress from Kubernetes basics to essential skills, learning to model, deploy, and manage applications in production. Exercises demonstrate how Kubernetes works with multiple languages and frameworks. You'll also practice with new apps, legacy code, and serverless functions.

Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches introduces Docker concepts through a series of brief hands-on lessons. Follow­ing a learning path perfected by author Elton Stoneman, you’ll run containers by chapter 2 and package applications by chapter 3. Each lesson teaches a practical skill you can practice on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. By the end of the month you’ll know how to containerize and run any kind of application with Docker.