Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef: Bring Behavior-Driven Development to Infrastructure as Code

The book contains a large amount of primer material: if you already know what TDD is and why you want to practice it, and if you already know some ruby, then probably half of the book isn't going to be super useful to you.For the remainder of the book, you have to either buy into the author's philosophy that BDD is a required workflow, or you have difficulty following the material. The author chooses to use a BDD toolchain consisting of a gem that the author wrote, Gherkin, Cucumber and rspec. If you want to follow a less heavyweight testing philosophy, this book won't help you much.If I were trying to follow BDD, this'd probably be a great book. But I want to write my tests with minitest (because it's built in to the standard library), and I don't want to follow the Gherkin/Cucumber BDD patterns (I find them overly verbose and not useful, your mileage may vary). As such, this book isn't actually incredibly useful to me: I got more testing done and faster by just reading the test kitchen website.

The book tried too little to accomplish too much, introduction of the technologies involved, outlining the practice of test driven development, convincing the user of the utility of that practice, designing and explaining the practice using the technologies, and introducing Gherkin-style test definitions and explaining their purpose.I would have liked to see the book assume that the user is sufficiently familiar with Chef and Rspec and the TDD workflow, with suggested resources to read in advance, and spend significantly more time giving practical examples of how to test infrastructure-as-code with code (not human readable definitions). I have even bought into the utility of Gherkin-based testing tools and the workflows they allow, but a majority of developers, especially covering operations simply will not have the problems that Gherkin intends to solve and spending a lot of time covering it is probably not very useful to them.

Had high hopes for this book, but I find it really hard to follow.I find the author's writing style extremely dull. Basically, it's "I did this. Then I did this. Then I did this. Then I did this" with very little in the way of explanation about why the author is doing what he's doing, often followed by a bunch of output. And I mean that literally. Here's an example, from just one paragraph: "I searched the docs page for...I determined that I could...I created a config file...", followed by over 2 pages of command line output. There is literally no narrative, it's just a verbatim list of commands to run. There's a lot of "go read the documentation". That's not what a book like this is for. In a book like this, I am looking for the author to give me the relevant information I need to know, instead of handwaving over it.The organization is also very poor. On the kindle edition, the output of commands can take up to several pages, with the important bits buried within, often with no commentary. Important concepts like recipes and cookbooks are discussed very briefly, completely divorced from any examples of how they are used. Also, when making changes to a file, good technical instruction books often show you exactly which file you are editing and which lines. The style used in this book is very inconsistent in those regards.Ultimately, the measure of any technical primer is its ability to teach to the reader, and for me, this book fails in almost every way.

Using the previous reviewer's suggestions as a guide (i.e. being by a computer to type in all the examples) and desperately needing a basic introduction to Chef (after spending the last 6+ years in Puppet-land), I've found this book to be incredibly valuable both as an introduction to Chef and as a framework for implementing TDD/BDD. What really bumps this up into "5+ star" territory is the willingness and the ability of the author to do in-depth after-sale support on the material of the book. I ran into some trouble (updates are posted on the O'Reilly errata site for this edition) working through an example, and not only did the author respond to my tweets for help on a weekend, but spend the better part of his Monday evening doing in-depth troubleshooting to assist me with my issue, for which I am forever grateful.

For a quick introduction to Chef, rspec and a background of what testing is, it's okay. For actually getting the testing done, it falls pretty flat. It doesn't cover serverspec, which seems to be the more popular method of integration testing. It doesn't cover testing LWRP's and using test cookbooks for that purpose. It doesn't cover a lot of things I figured out on my own that I would have expected this book to cover. At the end, it felt like a promotion of the author's extension to cucumber. At least I was able to go through it in a weekend, so I didn't waste too much time on it.

A fundamental star piece on today's devops cloud constellation, the book focus on using Chef properly to manage your infrasctructure

I've recently worked on a large Chef project at work, and this book was the perfect introduction to take me beyond the very basics of Chef up to the toolchain that we're now using in production. It's a fairly compact volume but points you in all the right directions to find out more. It could have done with one more run through a technical proof reader, though - there were a number of grammatical errors (up to 2 or 3 per page in places) and not all of the code examples worked out of the box. If you're reading this book, you're probably a good enough coder to fix the errors or just see what they were trying to do, but I did expect more from O'Reilly.

Hi,IMHO you could shorten the book to 30 pages. The basic idea is to get your IT to run the infrastructure as a test- and behaviour driven infrastructure. By chance, this is done with chef in the book. But if it comes down to details, the book won't help you much with it, it gives you a broad overview, which in short is:a.) Ruby introductionb.) chef introductionc.) test- and behyviour driven infrastructured.) an example of a toolchain.e.) writing testsgood for an overview, but lacks more information.Really frustrating, when looking on the many pages of chef/ruby/whatever console output in the book.