Free Downloads Pulling Strings With Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy (FirstPress)
Competent system administrators know their success hinges upon being able to perform often tedious tasks with rigor and punctuality. Such metrics are often achieved only by instituting a considerable degree of automation, something that has become even more crucial as IT environments continue to scale both in terms of size and complexity. One of the most powerful system administration tools to be released is Puppet, a solution capable of automating nearly every aspect of a system administrator's job, from user management, to software installation, to even configuring server services such as FTP and LDAP. Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy is the first book to introduce the powerful Puppet system administration tool. Author James Turnbull will guide you through Puppet's key features, showing you how to install and configure the software, create automated Puppet tasks, known as recipes, and even create reporting solutions and extend Puppet further to your own needs. A bonus chapter is included covering the Facter library, which makes it a breeze to automate the retrieval of server configuration details such as IP and MAC addresses.
Series: FirstPress
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (February 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1590599780
ISBN-13: 978-1590599785
Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.4 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,286,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #20 in Books > Computers & Technology > Networking & Cloud Computing > Networks, Protocols & APIs > LDAP #583 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Systems Analysis & Design #1619 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Software Design & Engineering
I liked what was in this book. It's a good overview of what puppet can do, with examples.The one thing that's missing, and it's driving me crazy is that it doesn't have an index! That's maddening for a reference book. In a perfect world, I'd like to see some more best practices and some suggestions for how to transition running machines on to puppet.Overall, a 'buy', but bring your own sticky notes to mark important pages...
If you are completely new to Puppet, you should definitely buy this book. It does a good job of walking through the basics of automating your data center. I would have liked to see some more in-depth examples, but the topics covered were fleshed out enough that I could figure it out on my own.I have a major complaint about this edition, however: when it comes to technical books, published code should ALWAYS be tested. It should be taken as absolute fact that the code published in a reference manual will function correctly and do what the author claims it will do. That's not the case here. For example:On pg. 116, the author creates a resource of type "apache::apache_files"But in the definition for "apache:apache_files" ON THE VERY NEXT PAGE it reads: define appache::apache_files ...with two 'p's. It's clear that this code could never have been tested, because it wouldn't work!But the author does demonstrate a thorough understanding of the subject matter, and I will probably buy "Pro Puppet" when it is released. But I sincerely hope the code is tested (or the editing is improved).
I just began using Puppet about 3 weeks ago to administer 20 systems. Although the online docs are good, it is always hit or miss. I found the book and ordered it immediately. I got it 2 days ago and spent all day going through it. I have already picked up more tips than I could have from all the online docs and examples - it is HUGELY worth the money just from that! One thing that I have learned, that is going to be a huge win - is the customization capabilities. We use ESM to manage/monitor security aspects of systems, and being able to write recipes with Puppet to match ESM security rules is going to be a huge plus for us.Thanks for a great resource and I am hoping that as Puppet matures, that the 2nd Edition is not far off.
This book walks you through everything Puppet-related - from setting up the puppetmaster, to creating your first class, to scaling and tuning puppet. I've got tons of sticky notes in my copy that I refer to at least a couple of times a month (now 8 months into a district-wide puppet rollout). Yes, there's not an index - but the sheer content/info in the book makes it a must-buy for anyone who wants to begin with Puppet.Puppet is now well into version 0.25.4, but the information in this book is still pertinent in many ways. I would love to see an updated version, though!
This feels like a decent e-book that Apress rushed to market too early. It's not only hampered by the lack of an index, but the page formatting in terms of the headers and footers feels like something a high schooler put together in order to pad out the page count. I own one of Mr. Turnbull's other books on linux hardening which I think is excellent, this book falls short of that standard.
This book is definitely a vital reference for anyone who's working with puppet; I picked it up after becoming frustrated with the current state of available information on puppet, and it turned my perspective around completely.I'm not sure that I would have managed to learn everything I needed to about puppet using only the docs on the website; often I got the familiar feeling when reading through the wiki that some crucial bit of information was being assumed, but this book always backed up its information with examples that I could use to grasp the idea being presented.On thing to note about the book -- It's really not structured to be a quick-start guide, but rather each chapter lays a foundation of knowledge that the next chapter builds upon. As such, I'd recommend setting aside a couple of afternoons to read through the book, ideally before you even begin to set up your puppet environment.
I'm going to side with other reviews, in that this book is "good, but could be better". First off, it's outdated. There's a few major evolutions since this book was published, so I can hope that the author has already submitted a revised edition to the publisher. Secondly, it's VERY basic. In other words, you won't get Puppet running effectively and flawlessly unless you stick to only the very basics detailed here.Puppet has many issues, and although it's a well-though-out program and solution, it suffers from poor examples and bad documentation on their website. So, as one Linux expert told me, "Puppet is hard." I struggled for some time just getting it to run at all. This book does very little to aid you in just getting Puppet running, although it spends quite some text to tell you how to install it.Recommend: Use an older version of Linux, such as Ubuntu 8.0.4, and you may have better luck.Puppet looks incredibly easy to understand and deploy. Unfortunately, the writers of documentation or books stop short of what I deem "real" help. After reading this book, the one thing I'm left with is a feeling of understanding, but the nearly complete inability to expand beyond basic examples. I'm confident I could deploy a Puppet solution, but unfortunately, just as the book refers to reductivelabs.com wiki pages for references and more information, Reductive Labs does very little to take it from there. No real effort is given from either party to connect the dots and make this easy.I recommend this book to introduce you to Puppet. I had to read it three times to really "get it", but I'm still stuck with lacking examples of syntax in many, many cases.
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