The Puppet design philosophy (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has posted anexcerpt from Puppet Best Practices, an upcoming book about thePuppet system configuration tool. It's a good place to look for thosewanting an introduction to how Puppet works. "Puppet can be somewhatalien to technologists who have a background in automation scripting. Wheremost of our scripts scripts are procedural, Puppet is declarative. While adeclarative language has many major advantages for configurationmanagement, it does impose some interesting restrictions on the approacheswe use to solve common problems."