Containers are transforming how modern applications are built, deployed, and scaled. Podman offers a powerful, secure alternative to Docker by eliminating the daemon and embracing rootless container execution. If you're ready to move beyond legacy workflows and gain full control over container management, this practical guide is for you. You’ll begin with container fundamentals and a side-by-side comparison of Docker and Podman to ease the transition. Then, you'll run your first container, manage its lifecycle, and use Buildah to build images from scratch. Skopeo helps you transfer and inspect images across registries. As you progress, you’ll secure your environment with rootless containers, signed images, and SELinux policies. You’ll also configure container networking, integrate workloads with systemd services, and troubleshoot issues using native Linux tools. The final chapters focus on modern developer workflows, showing how to migrate existing Docker workloads, manage containers and Kubernetes resources visually using Podman Desktop, and leverage Podman AI Lab to experiment with, run, and manage AI/ML models locally in a containerized environment. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build, run, and secure containers, automate workflows, and confidently manage deployments across DevOps and AI-powered environments.