Friday 2 September 2016

Book Review - Mastering Puppet Second Edition by Thomas Uphill

This is another in my infrequent series of book reviews, working in collaboration with the British Computer Society: -

Mastering Puppet Second Edition by Thomas Uphill

I'm currently investing some personal time in getting up-to-speed with some of the fundamental tools of Developer-Operations, aka DevOps, including Docker, UrbanCode Deploy, Git, OpenStack, Jenkins, Chef and, in this context, Puppet.

There are, of course, overlaps between some of these tools, so I was interested to get a better understanding of Puppet, in order to be able to position it in relation to other, similar tools.

This leads me onto the first part of my review; this book is definitely not for beginners - the title should make it clear, but this is aimed at a mastery of, rather than an introduction to, Puppet, which is a configuration management tool.

The book starts as it means to go on, diving straight into the detail of Puppet scalability, and continues to go deep and wide. Another clue is the length of the book, weighing in at nearly 650 pages, covering data hierarchies, storage, security, integration with Git, extensibility and troubleshooting.

Like a lot of Packt's publications, this is definitely something for the reference library - it's full of content, example code, complex integrations etc. and is something to which I will return as I continue to delve into Puppet and other related DevOps tooling.

So, in summary, as long as one appreciates that this book is aimed to achieving mastery, rather than an initial exploration, of Puppet, then this book is definitely worth adding to the virtual bookshelf.

In terms of a rating, I'd give this 8 out of 10.


For the record, BCS provided me with a free copy of this book, in order that I was able to read and review it.

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