Here’s a few brush notes review of the book Managing Windows Services With Chef.

I like the chapters dealing with specific cloud providers. The book gives detail on what is needed to setup up the chef-client properly on the cloud providers like firewall configuration, winrm settings, etc. It is handy and will definitely save a few hours of yak shaving when working wit windows.

The windows specific stuff are a handy reference like DISM for people coming from a mostly Linux background. An overview of windows resources from the opscode documentation in the book is a handy reference.

The advanced section on testing introduces rspec from people coming from a .net development background which is handy.

However, the book is a bit dated for the May release. Chef omnibus installers have been available for quite some while. It is mentioned in the latter chapters but the first chapter still describes the non-omnibus way of bootstraping chef.

In general the book could have used a bit more proofreading to update some aging parts of the documentation. But nonetheless its a handy reference to get some windows specific documentation if you’re into dead trees. for online documetnation the opscode webpage is handier.