The Terraform Book

by James Turnbull

Updated for Terraform 0.12! A hands-on, introductory book about managing infrastructure with HashiCorp's Terraform tool. Start small and then build on what you learn to scale up to complex infrastructure. Written for both developers and sysadmins. Focuses on how to build, test and run infrastructure and applications with Terraform and integration with tools like Consul. The book Chapter 1: An Introduction to Terraform Chapter 2: Installing Terraform Chapter 3: Building our first application Chapter 4: Provisioning and Terraform Chapter 5: Collaborating with Terraform Chapter 6: Building a multi-environment architecture Chapter 7: Infrastructure testing

Genres: Technology, Programming, Technical

326 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 26, 2016

Reviews

[Nedko Hristov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written book about Terraform: it's everything I need starting from the beginning including helpful details. It's one of The books about terraform you need to read. Plus it's very easy to read, and includes a lot of examples too.

So I've read it at safaribooksonline or as it is now - learning.oreilly.com and their reader mode is a peace of **** - the code blocks are misplaced, the formatting is inadequate. 1/3 of the efforts spent on the book were to figure out the formatting.

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice book that serve as introduction to Terraform. It guides you nicely and easily to Terraform philosophy, language and workflow. The edition I read (haven´t completed it though) seemed a little bit out of date nowadays (March-April 2021) but still use full for beginners. If you are not a devops guys, probably some of the examples are difficult to follow and/or irrelevant.

[Igor Gentil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introductory book for terraform beginners. Lots of examples and code available on GitHub! Recommend!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good hands on introduction to Transform. It introduces a lot of best practices and provides references to blog posts for diving in deeper. I have found it useful.

[Joel Tone · Rating 4 out of 5]

This provides a solid overview and walk through of Terraform. Definitely more of a tutorial than a reference book. I appreciate that the author keeps updating it as new versions come out.

[Huu Khiem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and to-the-point overview to using Terraform.

It includes the necessary introduction to the HCL syntax && some additional suggestions on setting up a Terraform workflow.

As a intermediate-user, I often wish that the book included comparisons between different approaches to things (e.g: directory structure, remote state, etc) so that I can be more informed when using them.

[Karl Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains very detailed code examples and step-by-step instructions. Perfect to get started with Terraform. Personally, I found most interesting the testing approaches described towards the end of the book.

[Rodrigo Ramos · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book to start to learn Terraform with AWS using clear examples and concrete theory. It's important to know that you will build a whole stack with each chapter, so, if you miss something, do not go forward until all be clear.

[Shaun Dubuque · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction and overview of capabilities & usage.

[Rafael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to Terraform. Have been using it as a cookbook alongside the official documentation.

[Cyber Killer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a nice manual, however the last 2 chapters are so 'meta', that they are hard to follow.

[Vignesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

good for beginners

[justin j ploegert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decidedly meh.

[Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - Good for a jumpstart with concrete samples.
But it doesn't go in depth on the concepts, and sometimes it can jump from one topic to another.

[Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book to start with Terraform. Should keep it as daily handbook.

[John Alan]

I'm close to completing the book - now I just want to play with some of the more advanced examples.

Very much a tutorial type book. Walking through each area of terraform for AWS.

So far I'm "quite" happy with the book - very cool technology.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A typical Turnbull book" :) I mean - it's very linear, it's very low-level & tutorialesque, but kinda sucks in terms of providing wider context (e.g. "helicopter overview"). It makes it hard to browse if you're looking for an answer to particular question. This convention work better for a bit more broad topic ("Art of Monitoring"), but Terraform itself (as a tool) is very straightforward what makes this book ... simply dull. Even if technically the content seems very right, there are plenty of examples & they make sense in general.

On the other hand author completely forgets about stuff like:

* applicability of Terraform outside of AWS (which have been used through the book)
* compatibility considerations - e.g. is there a way to find out whether this particular spec (& Terraform version) is compatible with recent AWS changes

Summary: if you want a start on Terraform, this book is not a bad idea (but you'll be good with the initial 30%), but you'll do pretty much equally good with the materials on the web.

[Srinivasan Nanduri · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book to read if you want to get complete understanding and premise of terraform

[Raj Dya]

to learn