Customer Reviews

RT Essentials

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

 

 

I was very dissappointed with RT Essentials. I had been using and administering an older version of RT for some time, but when I upgraded to the current version I thought I would benefit from reading this book. There are a lot of new features in the later versions and this book just barely mentions them. I had the feeling that it just almost told me what I wanted to know, but not quite. I would very much like to see an expanded, more detailed more comprehensive edition. I think it would take a book twice the size of the current edition to do RT right. I want complete tutorials on writing scrips, using templates, using custom fields, using saved searches, etc.

We've been using RT for several years. As one happy customer mentions at Best Practical's site, managing a project or service driven organization without RT is like watching TV without a TiVo. The software is powerful, flexible, and above all, adaptable to many styles of management for more than just technology projects. No question, the software gets 5 stars.

This book, however, is largely a reorganization of the information provided with the software. If you prefer to read printed materials instead of PDFs or HTML, this book will save you money on printer paper. But if you're looking for best practices, recipies, or enhancements such as those you'll find in the RT Wiki, you may be disappointed. In fact, for most of the advanced capabilities, you are referred by the book to other resources. The book does contain the occasional nugget, such as a half dozen lines of code to truly delete a ticket and related data. With some searching, you'd be able to find those, and better, at the RT Wiki, such as the particuarly valuable contributions from the University of Oslo (do an A9 search for "RT prosjektgruppen").

Compared to most O'Reilly books which set the bar for excellence, this one is merely average. However, I do recommend this book as an introduction for those considering whether it's worthwhile to move to RT from some other enterprise ticketing system, and for techs to give to managers who are more comfortable with hard copies than electronic documents. For any RT admin, it's certainly worthwhile to have documentation printed and organized in an easy reference, considering how much you've saved on the excellent software itself.

This is a short (~200 pages) walkthrough of the basics of Request Tracker. It starts with the fundamentals, sells the approach, then covers installation, the web interface, the command line interface and then into hacking and administration. The illustrations are good, and the text is well written, if a little terse.

Request Tracker (RT) is a great product. I am the only sysadmin at a small company, and having an automated tracking system is going to be an immense benefit for me. I bought "RT Essentials" to help me get up to speed on RT3 really quickly. And, since it was written by the programmer who's responsible for RT, the book had lots of detail and tips.

However, when it came down to implementing some of the code in the book, I found that it was already outdated. For example, I tried to set up the Autoreply template with Password by copying the code straight out of the book. It didn't work because the program codebase has changed too much since the book was released.

I was able to fix my template problem by hooking into the great RT user community, where the author contributes frequently.

All in all, I thought the book was really helpful for getting RT installed and getting me up to speed. For the nitty-gritty, I'd rely on the online wiki and great user community.

RT Essentials really disappointed me. This book contains a great deal of technical information, but could and should have contained a wider range of general information.

Here are a few things I would have liked to have seen:
1. A 10 page user guide for basic users of the software.
2. An explanation of default system behavior. What happens when a user sends an email to a designated email box? What does the canned response look like? How might one modify it? What are the options? (this was covered in a sort of all over the place way).
3. A discussion of RTFM, the plug-in is mentioned briefly in Appendix A. Since the software is downloadable from the same website that hosts RT, a one or two page synopsis could have been useful.
4. A discussion about other plug-ins, including a way to run some basic reports (a function that seems to be totally absent given my three days of experimenting with the software.)

I feel like a lot of filler was in this book. There was an entire chapter discussing different entities and attributes related to data structures inside the database. I guess that may prove to be helpful to some extent, but anyone with a database background should be able to figure this out with relative ease.

Bottom line, this book was helpful to get a general overview of the software capabilities. I do, however, think the 200 pages could have been better spent covering some basic topics.

I needed to assess whether this application would work for me, and this book did great with getting me this information.

When I first started learning about RT and how to apply the utility to our business, I needed a book that was simple and easy to understand. This taught me all the fundamentals and the examples were easy to follow.

Are you an end-user, system administrator or developer who interacts with RT on an occasional or regular basis? Authors Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky, Darren Chamberlain and Richard Foley, have written an outstanding book that is for everybody who has to use RT to manage tasks.

Vincent, Spier, Rolsky, Chamberlain and Foley, begin by providing some background about what ticketing systems are and how they can help save your job and your sanity. Then, they walk you through the process of setting up an RT server and configuring sane system defaults. The authors continue by showing you how to get up and running with RT's web interface. In addition, they explain how to interact with RT from your shell or console window. The authors also step you through the basics of turning a virgin RT server into a useful tool for tracking what you need to do inside your organization. Then, the authors show you how to extend RT's standard behavior with custom business logic. Next, they provide a look inside the RT configuration at Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a nonexistent company that makes heavy use of RT to manage their internal processes. Next, the authors walk you through RT's files on disk; as well as, the details of its database tables. Then, they describe how DBIx::SearchBuilder works. Finally, they show you how to set up a local sandbox for modifying and extending RT without putting your production server in harm's way.

This excellent book will be considerably more useful to you if you have at least a basic understanding of the Unix command line. Above all, this book will be very useful to you if you also have a basic understanding of Unix systems administration skills, and at least a little bit of experience programming in Perl.

The RT Essential describes the general inner structure of RT software.It mainly helps RT user to understand how to install RT and how to use other tool software ,such as perl and mason ,to develope RT for his own construct.It describes each item in RT generally.

RT has many application.many company use it to develope custumer service system,So I hope the author to write developer book on RT for programming.