Ask HN: The best non-hand-wavy path to understanding containerization

I'm a junior developer spending most of my time writing java/scala code for a big corp, and I've been intrigued by some of the recent developments in containerizations technologies (notably, Docker and LXC). I must be honest though, most of the concepts like namespaces, cgroups and port mapping aren't things that I'm terribly familiar with (presumably a byproduct of only crushing application code all day and having a separate release management team take care of deployments), and I'm looking to grasp these fundamentals in order to understand and effectively use some of the existing containerization technologies out there (for work and some side-projects). I want to further my understanding beyond the simple "Use this library, it does the job for you" to really get a feel of what's happening under the hood.

What does the HN community recommend to get up to speed with these concepts? Are there any non-Ops folks out there that have managed to compress this learning in a short span of time? Are there any ops folks that have some recommended material that I could steep in to quickly familiarize myself? I understand that in order to appreciate this, it may require getting a stronger understanding of virtualization itself, so I'm really looking for some guidance on the recommended journey.