Customer Reviews

Managing Infrastructure with Puppet

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Managing Infrastructure with Puppet is an exceptionally short "book" from O'Reilly dealing with the configuration management framework "Puppet".

With a pagecount of 31 in the ebook edition and a listed price of approximately $25.00, that's about eighty cents per page, so my expectations were extremely high regarding this work.

Unfortunately, after installing the Puppet packages on an Ubuntu installation per the instructions on page 1, the example on page 3 failed to work for me, nor did any of the example code. I am not an inexperienced Linux user and yes, I know how to use Google, but I would expect a chapter titled "Getting Started" to have some clue as to things that might go wrong.

There may be wonderful information in this text, but after the initial failures my interest in it's content evaporated. Should I need information on Puppet, I'll consult the development wiki for the product, your mileage may vary with the success of your installation.

Overall disappointing and not recommended.

Disclaimer, I was provided access to an electronic copy of this book by O'Reilly Publishing for review purposes.

This book has some good information, but with only 32 chapter pages there is really not that much of that. After all the book also attempts to provide an introduction to Puppet and that, besides being available from Puppet Labs, takes away 10 of those pages.

It probably should have been published with the O'Reilly "Pocket Guide" series, but then the price would have been about $10. Which would have been more appropriate.

The one star is just to bring balance to the total rating for this "book".

As expected, you can't learn much in ~50 pages. However, it does get you through the most basic tasks. If you want a more detailed dive into Puppet version 2.6+, then check out Pro Puppet, which was recently released. Do NOT purchase the old Puppet book from 2007. It's outdated by now...

This book has typos up the yang, is very VERY short, and is out of date with the latest puppet releases. I have a feeling the person (people) who wrote this were asked to on a hurried deadline rather than because of an intimate knowledge of the subject.

It is completely unusable in my occupation because of it's dated nature, as well as being so skimpy.

Caveat Emptor.

This short guide gives a whirlwind tour of everything you need to get started using puppet, as well as starting to scale it. And very quickly at that, as it can be read in an hour or two. An excellent benefit is that it was released recently and isn't full of now deprecated / legacy techniques such as the older "Pulling Strings with Puppet".

I agree that the price to content ratio is a bit out of whack, but at the same time, it allows you to gain a reasonable understanding Puppet in a single sitting, which has its own value. Also from a company perspective, if your organization uses Puppet, the price for all your employees to have access this and be more effective or spin-up faster is quite trivial. Should it cost less? Yes, so I subtract one star. Is still worth reading at this price? Definitely.

There's some good information here but it really isn't a book, it's a small 31 page pamphlet. $15 is just a bizarre amount of money to charge for a pamphlet.

I agree with the other reviewers in that the book is shorter than you might expect at 31 pages.

Nonetheless I found it to be a good introduction to puppet. I came from a background of having read about puppet only in vague terms. This book took me through the steps of actually installing puppet, exploring it on the command line, and generating some basic resources I could use for my projects right away. It painlessly got me over the gap of thinking I'd like to clean up my configuration and actually getting started. Quickly too, in a single sitting.

Sometimes brevity is a virtue.

This book is a bit over-priced for it's size, however it is concise and well laid out.
This book has done in 40+ pages what the previous Puppet Books couldn't do in 200+. It gives the public a good "starting point".
You could wait for the "Puppet for Dummies version" or you can use this book to help transition to the other 2 puppet books available.

jay,