I’ve been learning more about Chef recently. Chef is a big part of my goals to get my workstation under control and to work on fixing the interenet by making it easy for a person to have his own server.

In January 2013, learing Chef was hard. The documentation was lacking, and what documentation did exist tended to be really vague. Recently I started looking around for resources again, and this is starting to change. The “Getting Started with Chef” book has been great for explaining chef concepts with a focus on concrete examples which build upon one another.

Additionally, the chef resources from Opscode have been getting better. “Learn Chef” is really awesome in almost the same way as “Getting Started with Chef”, and the Chef docs are much more polished and complete than they were in January.

I am really impressed by these improvements. I once had a really hard time learning Chef. Just a few months later, the documentation is much better and I could see a novice having a much easier time getting started.

If you have been thinking about learning and using Chef for one of your projects, you should really look into it. The resources I linked above are more than enough to support you.