OpenStack Essentials

Excellent step by step instructions.

This is an excellent book for a developer who wants to learn the basics of using OpenStack. In a clear, straightforward and useful way it walks you through the process of setting up a personal OpenStack installation that you can experiment and learn with, walking you through the various modules step by step, and giving lots of practical tips and advice along the way.

These guys have identifed a market need, and done the minimum necessary to capitalize on it. The topic is relevant, but the writing is very poor. Once you've deciphered the mangled grammar, the author for the most part "describes" rather than "explains," in other words telling you "how" to do something rather than "why" or what it "means" - like a collection of man pages. On the plus side, at least these man pages are collected in a neat binding, so there's some value there. I have to think that someone out there has put together a more clearly written OpenStack overview - and it may be time for me to to recycle this investment and hit Google. I can only hope that O'Reilly will put out an equivalent/updated book soon. (Caveat: once you know and understand all about OpenStack and are looking for the installation recipes, this may be just the book for you. I'm not there yet - I needed OpenStack "demystified" first - like it says in the title.)

OpenStack Essentials is a very good guide for starting off with the very complex OpenStack framework. The book is divided into 13 chapters with almost every chapter focusing on one component of OpenStack. The chapters are very direct and concise but a bit on the short side. As a new OpenStack developer with no prior experience with the cloud this book helped me understand the lingo and high level concepts. There were times when I wanted more information and the book just refers to google. I would have preferred specific links but like the author says the technology is moving very rapidly and links may disappear. Overall I think this is a good intro to OpenStack and would recommend it to anyone who is just starting out with OpenStack. If you have experience with OpenStack and want an in-depth guide look for another book.

I was looking for a book to provide me an introduction of OpenStack. This book provided a great consolidated overview of OpenStack. I highly recommend this book if you do not have the time to search the web.

If you have little or no background with OpenStack the commands in this book will not guide you toward success past the initial install. This book assumes you know the location of numerous files that need to be edited but does not state where the file location is at.

Thorough and informative..

Worked very well as advertized

Be warned, the instructions only work with CentOS (book says any CentOS or Fedora work, but does not specify which is used in the examples) and only with a lot if Googling to fix problems. Even then, using CentOS 7 section 5 simply did not work. Other problems include the answers file not having the required parameters, having to disable SE Linux, typos in the examples. There are no updates on the Packt web site to cover any of the issues. I would not choose this book again. If you can get around all the problems, this acts as a very simple intro to OpenStack.