Pro Puppet (Expert's Voice in Open Source) by James Turnbull

by James Turnbull

Pro Puppet is an in-depth guide to installing, using, and developing the popular configuration management tool Puppet. The book is a comprehensive follow-up to the previous title Pulling Strings with Puppet . Puppet provides a way to automate everything from user management to server configuration. You'll learn how to create Puppet recipes, extend Puppet, and use Facter to gather configuration data from your servers. Puppet is a must-have tool for system administrators, and Pro Puppet will teach you how to maximize its capabilities and customize it for your environment.

Genres: Technical, Programming, Reference, Computers, Technology

Paperback

First published March 22, 2011

Reviews

[Greg Jastrab · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was wary of this after reading a few poor reviews on Amazon, but figured there'd be some info to glean out of it that was different from docs.puppetlabs.com. There were some practices to pull out, but too much explanation of using other systems like Git. Also there were too many "how to install X on Y..." sections - I'm not reading this book looking for installation documentation that will already be on the site of the software I'm trying to install. Out of the 300 or so pages, probably only 75 pages worth was useful content.

[Soham Chakraborty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Right now it is pretty outdated and I haven't really checked whether newer versions are available. Well with Puppet 4 everything will be new again.

[Robert Postill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this book and sadly I can't say I enjoyed it much. As a book it was a bland affair with a distinct worthiness to it through the prose style used which contained no discernable wit or humour to liven proceedings. The book equivalent of of overcooked vegetables.

So what was wrong? Three things stand out, at a base level there was something wrong in the presentation of long terminal dumps. Particularly frustrating was the repeated output of apt and yum. Surely anyone who works in operations or development for that matter can install software without this kind of handholding. It demeans the reader and just makes the book feel 100 pages too long. I also think that created the second issue at hand which was a lack of diagrams to explain the structure of the tool and its operation. It's not that there are no diagrams, more that the diagrams tail off quickly and so more complex puppet configuration and the interactions between the components are left as an exercise for the reader. What exacerbates that issue is the long strings of terminal output that demonstrate the success or otherwise of the tool. Why did it do that? Show me visually how this was missing rather than stumbling through the text trying to locate the point in the run the authors refer to. Finally and I think most crushingly I have no idea why this book is called Pro Puppet. If I see the word Pro I'm expecting an in depth discussion of the tool's philosophical underpinnings and it's sweet and rough spots. There was none of that. The tutorial in the book was welcome but again why in a Pro book was there this tutorial? the latter chapters do have some discussion of tools like MCollective but without sufficient detail to really be useful.

The book has already dated but as I wouldn't recommend buying it anyway it seems churlish to point that out. Stay away.

[Elie De Brauwer · Rating 2 out of 5]

The good news is that this book contains a lot of information on Puppet at various levels. The bad news is that information is very scarce, the text is littered with copy pastes from the console (and who's waiting for a diff or an apt-get install output, these things just litter the text and are a pain to see on an e-reader). Also nobody even considering how to use puppet isn't capable to install this. It is pointless to foresee installation instructions for every module (git and erlang anyone ?) for two distinct Linux distributions (and some modules are even specified 'from scratch' as well). Also things like 'getting started with git' are completely out of their place here. If I want to learn git, I'll read pro-git. Imho this book could be made close to ideal by getting rid most of the copy-paste stuff and installation instruction and it would only have a third of the page count.

[Alessandro Pellizzari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Questo libro non si può leggere senza avere sotto mano almeno un computer con un po' di macchine virtuali (o diversi server fisici) su cui fare i test.

Presenta situazioni reali e propone soluzioni dettagliate.

Ha, purtroppo, qualche difetto: alcune (poche) configurazioni si riferiscono a una versione già vecchia di Puppet (ma si trovano informazioni online su come risolvere) e, un po' più grave, a volte è difficile capire quale file stia invitando a modificare.

Per uno che abbia già usato Puppet sono cose semplici da intuire (e infatti dopo qualche capitolo è un problema minore), ma per chi inizia può essere disorientante, e si continua ad andare avanti e indietro con le pagine per capire dove fosse scritto in quale directory andasse messo il tal file o cose del genere.

[Sebastian · Rating 2 out of 5]

the code listings in this book contain lots of errors and reading through it feels like it was copy&pasted together in a hurry. overall disappointing if you want to learn about puppet itself. it also teaches about tools around puppet and massive scaling, maybe its more useful if you want to learn about that. the basic puppet stuff can be learned simply by using the puppet learning ressources online

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was pretty good but could have been better, missing some advanced uses of puppet that I had hoped to see, like using Augeas (http://augeas.net/). That said, most the content that is there is pretty solid and I enjoyed seeing the Foreman and dashboard information.

I would recommend this book to anyone who routinely uses puppet and already has the basics figured out.

[John Chilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a developer not a system administrator, my interest in puppet is for setting up and updating virtual machine images for cloud deployments. For my purposes this book was an excellent introduction. I found all of the examples clear, I developed a very clear sense of what puppet is capable of, and how I would use it. I was the right mix of concrete examples and high level descriptions.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

The introductory material in this book was helpful, but overall I found it only marginally useful. It was a bit too dense and application-specific to be a good tutorial, and not organized enough to be a good reference. It was already obsolete by the time I picked it up, a common problem with books about open source software projects.

[Povilas Balzaravičius · Rating 2 out of 5]

More about "Pro", less about "Puppet".

If you'd like to know how to install Puppet, Git, RabbitMQ, Ruby, some Ruby gems, Cucumber and many many other stuff - this book is for you. You even will be able to learn how to use Git :-)

The bad part: the book is supposed to be about Puppet :-(

[Michael Halligan]

The only cohesive and useful Puppet documentation I've read. If you need to work with Puppet, you need this book.

[Thomas Zeeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could use some serious editing. Content is otherwise ok.

[Karthik Bhat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice tool. Not so nice book.