Great book for getting started with Chef. As usual with O'Reilly, the book is full of good content and examples. Easy to read and follow, and for a first-timer with Chef (or any orchestration tool), I found it quite useful for helping me get my head around the topic and to follow the examples. I'm doing a lot of work in AWS these days, so Chef is a great tool to understand better for building and administering systems as they become more complex.

A very good tutorial about Chef. It could do with an updated edition as Chef versions are released quickly.

Excellent book to get a solid introductory knowledge on Chef.

Firstly, understand that this book is out of date, and you should go directly to the website for Chapter 9, which deals with setting up chef server. The book was written before a bunch of changes moving from 11 -> 12.

It's a solid introduction to Chef, and produces a fairly quick tour, but spends far too much time on meaningless detail (yeah, I get that chef client and chefDK are entirely different, but I'd have enjoyed a simple explanation of what _knife_ is for before using it several times), and tends to skip around a bit. For example, you're asked to 'vagrant halt' a node and host at one point without some necessary troubleshooting steps about bringing the hosts back up, in a couple of locations the paths are mangled, and there's an IP address that changes a couple of times. I'm about two thirds of the way through and I still don't quite get the deployment system, but it's given me a decent grounding, and I've managed to fix most of the problems that I ran into following the text. I suspect that I'd like it more if it didn't feel quite so rushed, or took some time to explain certain concepts a little more thoroughly, particularly given the amusingly kitchen-themed commands that are largely uninformative.

A decent introduction for Chef. The main complaint I have with many of introductory books like this is that they do not go into enough detail. The book gives some good examples but I want more information. The examples never focus on the same type of issues I will run into and I would prefer a more in depth introduction. Chef documentation is sparse or out of date to begin with and I was hoping for more documentation on the approach of some of the standard features.

Best introduction to Chef ever! This book will get you from zero to intermediate+.

Well written. Covers everything necessary to use Chef.

Not the fault of the author, and much my fault for not checking first. Chef has changed a LOT in recent years by the looks of it, and progress have done their best to obfuscate its open source roots. All the major elements have been rebranded and Chef is now caked in layers of other portfolio products that are not mentioned in the book. The core information in the book is most likely still valid, but you'll have to do a lot of interpretation to determine what is still useful to you or what things are called under the new nomenclature.

Other than that, there's a lot of simplistic stuff as was mentioned by other folks ("What is configuration management?" etc) that is probably not necessary but O'Reilly's "learning" series has always been about starting from near-zero. That said, if you aren't familiar with this subject or conversant in Chef you might have a hard time telling what parts of the book are still applicable at all. Unfortunately this sort of corporate rebranding and management of projects like Chef is pretty common, but it does keep a lot of us employed. Lesson learned, check the publisher date.

Great build up from skeletal structure to meaningful bodies of code that map mathematically to the exposition in the theory. Pure structuralism is action! in teaching..However a verbosity mark could be reduced for areas which appear idempotent in information transfer!

Out of date, too simplistic and somewhat disjointed.

Chefは機能豊富で自由度の高いConfiguration Management Toolですが

その裏返しで非常にラーニングコストが高いツールでもあります。

本書は敢えて使う機能を最低限に絞って中上級者向けの（多くは

全く使われない）詳細な設定を省略することで非常に快適にChefの

世界へ入って行くことができる貴重な本です。

出版後にChef 12への大きな一歩がありましたので 一部記述が

古くなっていますが書籍のWebサイトでフォローがあります。

レシピを書くのに必要十分な基礎が1冊に詰め込まれていますので

これからChefを学ぼうとする方には特におすすめです。

Good Book for Beginner

I found the book "Learning Chef" very useful. The detailed explanations with examples provided a thorough knowledge and deep understanding of what authors really meant. I would recommend this book to beginners and also who wants to revisit automation coding.