I’m excited to announce that Chef Essentials, my third book on Chef, is now available. It is available at Amazon or directly from the publisher, Packt Publishing. This book represents an update and expansion of my first book about Chef, Instant Chef Starter. Chef Essentials is almost three times the length of the Chef Starter and targets folks who want to learn how to get started using Chef for essential and more advanced usage.

Chef Essentials contains more detailed contents on the areas that the first book covered as well as new material altogether. Examples of what Chef Essentials covers includes:

• Information on managing infrastructure and how to model it with Chef
• A complete example of deploying a web application and dependent infrastructure
• Testing your work with Test Kitchen and ChefSpec
• Writing recipes to support multiple platforms
• Chef integration with Vagrant
• Advanced uses of data bags including encrypted data
• Installation of the lastest stable Chef server (11.x)

If you are new to Chef, I hope that Chef Essentials provides you with what you need to know in order to get up and running with Chef quickly and effectively!