I have recently read (and re-read) several books on Chef in order that I can recommend books to clients who are starting with infrastructure automation (and to remind myself of the more obscure uses of knife, encrypted databags, and so on). In this post I comment on these books:

• Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Matthias Marschall
• Managing Windows Servers with Chef by John Ewart
• Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (2nd Edition) by Stephen Nelson-Smith
• Automation Through Chef Opscode by Navin Sabharwal and Manak Wadhwa

Summary: read Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook for a good introduction to Chef on both Linux and Windows; read Managing Windows Servers with Chef if you manage many Windows machines; but most of all read Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef because without a test-driven approach your infrastructure code will rapidly become tangled, unsupported, and obsolete.

Continue reading Using Chef for infrastructure automation – reading list