Customer Reviews

Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World

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Great book! It's not really technical, it doesn't have script examples, and doesn't enter into the use-this-tool vs. that-tool debate. It's not specific to a particular set of tools, which is great. The value of this book is that it focuses more on establishing approaches to SCM. Items include how to attack SCM problems, items to consider, and even how to approach things from a people perspective. Often we get so focused on the technical side we may miss the people side. I will be using what I've learned from this book.

I have reviewed this book and I am not surprised how right on the money it is! I know Bob from CMCrossRoads so I am not surprised that the book is a very useful, and right on point, to the subject of CM in today's corporate world!

I have many books on the subject and most are very dry, and text book like! It is great to have a more 'real' book on the subject that takes the task of SCM and makes it easy for anyone to understand! My only fear is he is going to take some of my future clients away from me as they will understand the subject too well!!...8-) LOL

Great job guys!

-----mikeD348

"Configuration Management Best Practices" is a sharing of process wisdom by one who is obviously a seasoned practitioner. Author Robert Aiello has spent some time in the trenches of the Unix and Java platforms and has learned best practices the hard way. (Note that the text is indeed heavily oriented toward Java ... .NET-related comments are an obvious after-thought. Which is okay as the book is not a technical deep dive, but the reader should just beware.)

The author presents his subject in four parts. In the first part, "The Core CM Best Practices Framework", the author subdivides into six functional areas which he describes in a similar manner. This section is certainly worthwhile and captures the activities, but I was confused by the normalization of the material: trying to distinguish between build v release v deployment seems to add at least one section too many, regardless of what the official terminology is. The next part on "Architecture and Hardware Configuration Management" was only few short pages and provided little value for me. Part 3 on "The People Side of CM" brought up some interesting ideas, but I question whether they fit with the theme of this book. In Part 4, the author hit his full stride with an excellent survey on frameworks and compliance in the context of SCM.

"Configuration Management Best Practices" is good content in need of a better editor. The abstractions resulted in confusion and repetition, especially in Part 1. While the text was not riddled with typos and grammar mistakes, there were a noticeable few. Legal outline numbering works well in white papers and SOWs, but I don't think it added much to this book beyond confusion (At one point, paragraph numbering was five levels deep!). The use of anecdotes produced mixed results. I liked the anecdotes about release mistakes causing chaos in the world economy and with critical life support systems, but they were too short and sketchy to fully illustrate their point. Elsewhere, such as in "Overcoming Resistance to Change", there seemed to be too many anecdotes with questionable relevancy. In several instances, the author brought up some good ideas but provided only a teaser level of detail - thus leaving them undeveloped.

I recommend "Configuration Management Best Practices". I learned from it, but it could have been better. I have a more detailed review on my blog "The IT Manager" at itmgr.org.

Configuration Management Best Practices offers practical methods for addressing six ideas basic to software engineering, linking them to real-world business objectives. While this is a title for software development companies, it's reviewed here because no business collection should be without it, either. The keys to implementing a best practices format and designing applications that take full advantage of CM best practices make this an outstanding selection!

I believe that there is a lot of practical advise in this book and I think it's great that the author does not try to compare all the tools on the market. However I would of still have preferred some examples of how certain problems were solved and what tools were used. Maybe this will be available in the future on the website as currently it is pretty empty.