Extending Puppet

Extending Puppet

[Disclaimer I: I received a free copy of the book for the promise of writing a review.] [Disclaimer II: I’m mentioned twice in the book.]

A few weeks ago, Alessandro asked me to publish a review of his book “Extending Puppet”. After a bit of waiting until the publisher could provide me with access to the eBook, I could finally finish it up this weekend.

“Extending Puppet” is a comprehensive overview of the modern puppet landscape. From explaining the basics of Puppet syntax over discussing migration to Puppet to development of the enterprise puppet infrastructure to deployment strategies to the tool ecosystem to programming of the nuts and bolts of custom types and functions to the future development of Puppet 4. While Alessandro surveys the breadth of the possibilities, of course the most intricate technical details must be elided to avoid overwhelming the reader with information that is better gathered from the original reference manuals.

As is said in the foreword, the book is actually misnamed. “The Complete Puppet Handbook” would be a much better fit. Personally I might even prefer it to be called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Puppet” and it should have a big “Do not Panic!” decal on the back.

All in all I can recommend the book heartily both to the novice - as a starting point to plan the usage of puppet - as well as to the hardened veteran - to ascertain the professional toolbox is complete.