Test driven infrastructure with Chef (2nd edition)

Disclaimer: I got this book as part of the bloggers review program at O’Reilly.

Overview.

A really good book on the, sometimes arcane and frustrating as hell, world of Chef and infrastructure in general.

The author Stephen Nelson-Smith proposes a very hands on approach as a way to learning, inspired by Zed Shaw series of books, “Learn X the hard way…”

I wasn’t sure about this approach but I found it very refreshing and well suited for the subject, so a big plus there.

The version I read was an Early Release so things may change on the final one, so I expect to be even better.

There are two chapters in the book that I think can be easily skipped, chapter 3 and 4. They provide an introduction to Ruby (chapter 3) and the concepts of TDD and BDD (chapter 4).
Of course, if you are new to both the language and those testing concepts you will find value on them.

Chapter 5 reads more like a good white paper on the concepts of Test Driven Infrastructure than a chapter on a hands-on practical book. I did enjoy reading it, but I think the chapter is misplaced, more on this on my conclusions below.

There are also a lot of pages that printout the complete output of running chef (or some tests) into the console. I think some reduction and highlight of the important parts could be welcome.

Conclusion

The material on the book is great and I will highly recommend to anybody that is using Chef or plan to use Chef to get a copy.

Somehow I found the parts on testing (that I was the most interested in) not as good as the introductory chapters on using Chef. I think this is not a problem with the book/content but mostly an issue on how new (and by extension immature) is this field (infrastructure testing).

The chapters on tool selections (for testing) can use some work too, they feel a bit long and verbose.

Again, the version I was able to read is the very Early Edition (Raw and Unedited) so I expect the book to significantly improve in the final one.