Book Review: Pulling Strings with Puppet

Puppet is a great looking configuration management tool written in Ruby, from Luke Kanies at Reductive Labs. Recently, James Turnbull has written a book, Pulling Strings with Puppet, about it.

I’ve interviewed both Luke and James about Ruby, Puppet, and James’ book. So, it’s only fair that I turn an eye to the book as well. In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that Apress gave me a PDF of this book for review purposes.

Pulling Strings with Puppet was published as an eBook, through Apress’ imprint firstPress. It’s a really big book to see published this way, coming in at 187 pages, two or three times the size of a lot of ebooks. Like other books in the firstPress line, this one is also available in print (the amazon links in this review point to the paper copy, if you want the PDF, look here and follow the link).

James is an accomplished Apress author, having also published Pro Nagios 2.0 and Hardening Linux (both of which come highly regarded). As such, he’s certainly proven his chops in the sysadmin world, so his book on Puppet can be seen as something of a vote of confidence in the system.

The book contains seven chapters, as follows:

1. Introducing Puppet
2. Installing and Running Puppet
3. Speaking Puppet
4. Using Puppet
5. Reporting on Puppet
6. Advanced Puppet
7. Extending Puppet

The first chapter should whet your appetite for the rest of the book, chapters three and four will get you running along smoothly, but I think it’s the last three chapters that really make this book worthwhile. In chapter five the discussion of the built in report tools and the mechanism for building custom reporting will be of interest. I really liked chapter six’s coverage of scalability (both the admission that Puppet still needs work and the workarounds that can help scale it until the work gets done). All of chapter seven was interesting reading, and shows the ease of extending Puppet and Facter (one of the underlying libraries that makes Puppet work).

This book is filled with helpful code samples and pointers to external resources that look very useful. It’s well written and easy to understand. As good a tool as Puppet looks to be, this looks like an equally good book to get you going. If you’re doing configuration management for anything more than a box or two, run, don’t walk, and pick up your copy of Pulling Strings with Puppet.