

The Chef Survival Guide Book - jrobertfox
https://leanpub.com/chef-survival-guide?utm_source=hn

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jetblackio
Finally a book on Chef. I just purchased it and will be reading it over the
next few weeks. Still waiting for one from Oreilly.

EDIT: Bah, maybe I'm not familiar with Learnpub, or maybe I didn't read the
fine print, but this book is under active development and is currently only 42
pages long and is pretty skimpy. Oh well. Hopefully it iterates quickly.

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jrobertfox
Yeah I plan on doing a batch of updates this week and flesh out more of the
content next week. Let me know what topics are of most interest to you and
I'll prioritize those. Thanks!

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jetblackio
Thanks for the response. While I haven't read the book yet and only briefly
looked through it, I think the most important areas to cover are 'development
process/workflow' and 'testing'. Opscode does a pretty good job of explaining
how to actually write cookbooks and things like LWRPs, but the two areas I
mentioned are rather fragmented on the web.

I've also heard about the idea of 'Library Cookbooks', and the idea of having
a generic cookbook that you can include in an organization-specific cookbook
seems very intriguing. If you are familiar with this concept, including it the
book would be quite worthwhile.

Another area I would be very interested in is Chef Best Practices. I've gotten
myself into quite a bit of trouble by putting way too much information in my
roles, only to run into all sorts of trouble with versioning when working in
multiple environments i.e, 'dev', 'test', 'prod'.

Anyway, thanks for putting in the effort to get a book out. Chef is a little
starved in the way of accessible information (I shouldn't have to resort to
IIRC multiple times per day to get questions answered). This is badly needed.

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jrobertfox
Thanks for this, you have the same concerns as I that prompted the book, which
started out as the development of the "Chef Broiler Plate"
<https://github.com/jrobertfox/chef-broiler-plate> because there were all
these great tools, but no cohesive idea on how to integrate all of them.

I think i'll add a section that goes over the process as you say, because once
the framework is set up you could

-create cookbook -build tests -write book -verify quality -test on vagrant -version/promote

something like that.

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jetblackio
Sounds like we are on the same page exactly. That process sounds good. And if
you are able to clearly lay out how all the various tools integrate in to a
cohesive whole, you'll have solved a very big problem in the Chef community.

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philipDS
Slightly off-topic, but what exactly is the difference between Puppet and
Chef? How do they differ?

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druiid
I would say the biggest difference between Puppet and Chef comes down to Chef
is basically 'pure' Ruby while Puppet has a DSL derived from Ruby, which is
meant to be easy to work with.

I personally prefer Puppet because there's generally one way to do things,
while it also allows you to extend the resources and functions available by
falling back to custom written Ruby libraries.

The Puppet 'code' looks pretty basic and is all generally derived from the
core resource types defined here:
<http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html>

You will also see some examples of what defined resources might look like
there.

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trustfundbaby
I've been struggling with Chef for a few months now and it has repeatedly
blown my mind how, for something as popular as it appears to be, there is
simply no good reading material for it. This is timely and a really big deal.

Good speed.

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jrobertfox
Thanks so much! Can I quote you on that for the landing page?

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trustfundbaby
absolutely!

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oski
Awesome. This looks great and I just purchased a copy. However, many of the
chapters are listed as "under development." When can we expect them to be
finalized and released?

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jrobertfox
I'll be updating the content of each chapter and the book as a whole (the plan
is) on a weekly basis.

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fishbacon
At a glance I thought this was a book on cooking for developers, this idea
pleased me. I think when I finally finish being lazy I might write a book
about cooking meant for developers.

A book on Chef is also cool.

