Chef Blogs

New Book: “Customizing Chef” by Jon Cowie

Lucas Welch | Posted on | awesome chefs | community

The fine folks at O’Reilly just published our good friend and Awesome Chef Jon Cowie‘s (Etsy) book Customizing Chef. This book is a must read for anyone who has already gone through our Fundamentals webinar series, or is using Chef beyond the beginning stages.

Chock full of tip, tricks, and how-to knowledge from a master Chef, “Customizing Chef” is described like this:

Take advantage of Chef’s highly customizable design to tackle specific automation issues that you can’t solve by simply using Chef’s tools, resources, and services out of the box. With this practical guide, you’ll examine the internal structure of this configuration management technology and learn where, how, and why to add custom code.

What will you get from Jon’s new how-to manual?

  • Explore Chef’s typical setups and why you’d want to customize them
  • Learn the Ruby concepts needed to write customizations
  • Customize the Chef run process and explore Chef’s internal classes
  • Gain more insight into your Chef runs through handlers and Chef’s event stream
  • Level up your Chef recipes by writing your own resources and providers
  • Create and extend plugins for Knife—Chef’s command-line tool
  • Interact with the Chef API to write scripts and reports
  • Learn how to contribute customizations to the Chef community

You can order Jon’s book here. And while you wait for your download or physical copy to be delivered, check out a preview of all you’ll learn by watching Jon’s presentation, “Customizing Chef for Fun and Profit” from this year’s #ChefConf.