Scott WinklerTerraform in Action

I thought this book has the best table of contents out of the available ones and I was not disappointed. It delivered on every front. Zero to Terraform hero.I passed the Terraform cert exam after reading this for those who are looking to get certified.

tfcodeのリファクタリングの話題は手を動かしながらできるストーリーの進め方で、かつterraformの各種コマンドをうまく使いながらやっていく方法などが説明されていてよき基本的に世にある奴がこれから新規に書くならば〜と言う前提があるが、これはいかにメンテナブルなIaCコードを作るか、と言う視点で語られるのが好きな感じ

I had high hopes when I bought this book but quickly realized the author didn't do a good job of explaining in a simple way. When I got to Part-1, chapter-3, I got totally lost. The author tried to explain functional programming by building the Mad Libs word game, but he used too many new concepts without properly explaining and letting the readers digest slowly. For example, he squished input variables, shuffle function, validation block, dynamic block, templatefile, output block, for expressions, local values, Implicit dependencies, count, for_each, and conditional expressions in one chapter. It made me confused and lost. I had to watch youtube tutorials to understand each of the concepts I mentioned above. After that, I tried to read chapter-4 but it talked about how to build a multi-tiered web application in aws but it was too complicated. I tried to follow the chapter but when I passed half of the chapter, I realized I wasn't understanding anything. I ended up creating lots of .tf files without understanding the concept. I am not sure why he decided to explain multi module configuration while the reader is NOT even comfortable with a single module configuration. I don't think this is a good book for beginners. I ended up buying another book named "Hashicorp Infrastructure Automation Certification Guide" and I am glad I did. I am at Chapter 7 and had no issues following the book. It is very easy to understand and the author doesn't explain too many things at once.

This isn't a bad book, it's just not a great book. I DO NOT recommend this as your first Terraform book - it's NOT for beginners. It does try to start simple and build up, but it takes an incomplete and disjointed approach with far too many gaps along the way, so it will probably just frustrate and confuse anyone brand new to TF.Once you've learned the basics of TF elsewhere, this book will supplement your knowledge with some solid pro tips, techniques, and best practices/gotchas that are definitely worthwhile. On the whole, therefore, this book is worth buying IF you're serious about really learning as much about Terraform as you can (because there are so few good books on the market).My problem is that while there are many good pieces, overall it remains incomplete and just generally confusing (no matter what level of experience you have)!The book assumes the reader has broad experience with both cloud infrastructure and software development (including Git). While Winkler does explain some infrastructure choices and components in detail, for the most part he assumes the reader will already know what the various cloud components and services he's using are (ex: Lambdas, S3, VPCs/subnets, IAM roles, etc.), what they do, and why he's using them. If you're not coming to this book with experience deploying cloud infrastructure by other means, this book leaves a LOT unexplained. Sometimes that's not too bad, but when it comes to matters like security components (networking, secrets/TLS/SSH, IAM roles & policies, etc.), it's a real problem in my opinion.Generally each chapter in the book focuses on one aspect of TF, and uses 1 or 2 example projects to do so. One nice thing is that each of the 3 top cloud providers are featured in at least 1 chapter, so that's good if you want to learn TF for a multi-cloud infrastructure (note: he uses AWS in most chapters).However, on the whole I think the examples are (again) often too confusing for beginners, while not being nearly production-ready or real-world enough for pros (i.e. too academic, not 'hardened', etc.).Finally, it's hard for me to explain why, but overall I think this book is often just too darn confusing. I'm not a pro cloud DevOps guy, but I'm not _new_ to IaC, Terraform, or cloud services (and I've been coding for decades). Even so, in almost every chapter I had to re-read sentences or whole paragraphs several times just to make sense of the writing. The words and sentences were clear and easy to read, but what they _meant_ ... it just didn't add up a lot of times.My conclusion is that it comes down again to Winkler just making too many assumptions. He throws a lot of stuff out at you pretty fast, and assumes you think the way he does, have all the experience he does, and it'll all just add up. Unfortunately it often just doesn't. He needs to get a broad group of readers to provide editing advice for the next edition of this book if he wants it to appeal to a wider audience.One last rant: Adding to the above problem is that he too often punts on some of the most complicated details of the sample code. While the book is full of code samples, he repeatedly takes a lazy shortcut of hiding some of the most complex actual TF code in modules that _aren't_ printed or discussed in the book – then he says you can get that code from the Github repo (but he never explains it). This is a lazy punt, and Manning's editors should know better (if not their author). Other times he does share what looks like a simple block of TF code, but it actually relates to a very complicated component which he doesn't explain in any meaningful detail (the TLS provider in particular, which he uses to generate SSH keys, gets zero explanation ... not that the reader could cause any problems by getting SSH keys wrong, sigh).Final word: This is a good book, with lots of useful value to a mid-level Terraform user or better, but it's NOT for beginners (and be prepared for some confusion even if you're a DevOps ace).

Clear ti understand and many examples