Puppet 3.0 Beginner's Guide

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.

John Arundel

John Arundel is an infrastructure consultant who 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 away. Hubris, because he likes building systems that are as good as he can make them.

He was formerly a senior operations engineer at global telco Verizon, designing resilient, high-performance infrastructures for corporations such as Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He now works independently, helping to bring enterprise-grade performance and reliability to clients with slightly smaller pockets but very big ideas.

He likes writing books, especially about Puppet. It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them, or maybe they just like the pictures. He also occasionally provides training and coaching on Puppet, which turns out to be 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.