Puppet 3 Starter: FAQ and Errata

By on April 16, 2013 -

FAQ

Referring to pages about Determinism a reviewer said: The author is doing everything possible to avoid using the term idempotent

In a sense, yes. 🙂 This is because the theory and practice around idempotency and using it effectively weren’t something I could fit within the standardized format Packt wanted in the book. I did cover this topic extensively in Learning Puppet 4 specifically in the Why Declarative? chapter.

Note: This is also the answer to most questions of the nature “why didn’t you cover foo or bar?”. There are a lot of other topics I simply couldn’t fit within the 50 page absolute limit for the Instant Starter series.

Will you do a longer book about Puppet foo or Puppet bar?

Learning Puppet 4

I have done so! O’Reilly gave me the opportunity to do a much more detailed and in depth book, Learning Puppet 4. I am very happy with the detail and depth of that book and recommend it highly.

I also publish articles from content which did not make it into the book on this site. So check back here for posts with the #Puppet tag.

Why so much sudo throughout the book.

Very little you do in the puppet world will need root privileges. As a general philosophy I try to encourage people to do as little as they can as root, and to use sudo instead of using a root shell. My writing reflects this philosophy.

Errata

Wow, the indentation is really inconsistent.

Yes. All of this was marked to be fixed in both the final stage of editing, and in the prefinal review, but was not fixed before it went to press. If you are confused by something make a comment here and I’ll send you the correct text.

Installation: Step 4

$sudo

The command is sudo, with the dollar sign supposed to represent a prompt. This was marked and fixed during final review, but slipped through a few times.

Page 22, in the template example

The following code is incorrect:

server = <%= @server =>
environment = <%= @environment =>

It should be the following:

server = <%= @server %>
environment = <%= @environment %>

Page 23, Referring to other resources

Terminating single quotes in the first 2 examples are missing.

Page 25, Module philosophy

Original sentence: “This makes it to use the site manifest as a documentation for the site configuration.”

This was an editing error that was marked for fix but apparently didn’t make it. The correct sentence:
“This makes it possible to use the site manifest as documentation for the site configuration.”

Page 32, Use Hiera Data in a Puppet Module

Original sentence: “Since this value is defined is in the common file,”

This was an editing error that was marked for fix but apparently didn’t make it. The correct sentence:
“Since this value is only defined in the common file,”

How can I get a fixed version?

I personally fixed the ePub version of the book and made that available to Packt. Hopefully they will send a fixed version to you. If you haven’t received one, contact me with your purchase information and I’ll send you a patch file containing all the fixes.