Presented in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial format, Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide will lead you through the basics of setting up your Puppet server with plenty of screenshots and real-world solutions. This book is written for system administrators and developers, and anyone else who needs to manage computer systems. You will need to be able to edit text files and run a few commands on the command line, but otherwise no system administration or programming experience is required.

Author Biography

John Arundel is an infrastructure consultant, which means he helps people make their computer systems more reliable, useful, and cost-effective, and has fun doing it. He has what Larry Wall describes as the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. Laziness, because he doesn't like doing work that a computer could do instead. Impatience, because he wants to get stuff done right now. Hubris, because he likes writing code that is as good as he can make it. He was formerly a senior web operations engineer at the global telco Verizon, designing resilient, high-performance infrastructures for corporations like Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He now works independently, helping to bring enterprise levels of performance and reliability to clients with slightly smaller pockets, but very big ideas. He likes writing books, especially about Puppet (Puppet Cookbook is available from Packt). It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them. He also occasionally provides training and coaching on Puppet, which it turns out is far harder than simply doing the work himself. Off the clock, he can usually be found driving a Land Rover up some mountain or other. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall and believes, like Cicero, that if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need. You can follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.