Customizing Chef: Getting the Most Out of Your Infrastructure Automation

I'm no novice Chef cookbook developer but I'm not an expert either. I've been involved with developing a new configuration strategy for our product that has both Windows- and Linux-based nodes. I have been using Chef for about 8 months now, supporting existing cookbooks, and developing my own. We have an on-premise Chef 12 Enterprise server.The chapters dealing with the following topics "in-depth" made this book worth having since these are topics I wanted to expand my knowledge on.- Chef infrastructure- chef-client run walk through- knife plugin development- LWRP and HWRP development- Chef REST APII only gave it 4-stars though since I was wishing it had a topic knife bootstrap - anatomy of a bootstrap, modifying or extending bootstrap behavior beyond the custom template, etc. I would've given it a 4.9/5.0 if the rating mechanism allowed me.

Really good book. It is the next step up from an introduction book. As someone who has been doing chef for a while, I still learned from it. It talks about the inner workings of chef and how to customize it.

Wow! I got this book based on Seth Vargo's review. Its great! If your look for a book that goes beyond the basics this is the one. The author discusses concepts like HWRP, and LWRP's in depth. Its a great book to advance your chef skills.

This was a excellent book to help me write my fist recipe using a custom LWRP. I have been to a couple chef classes but I really though this book explained everything better.

I am admittedly biased being one of the technical reviews for Jon's book, but I have to say this is **the** book you need to be successful with Chef in complex environments. My "Learning Chef" book (coming soon) covers the basics and Customizing Chef is a natural successor to the basics. With advanced topics like custom knife plugins and LWRPs, Jon discusses many important patterns and thought processes that are vital to managing a successful infrastructure with Chef.

Good