deploying openstack by ken pepple

Where do I begin?

How about with this being perhaps the most overpriced tech book I have ever seen. At just under 70 pages, and a penny shy of $25, Deploying OpenStack by Ken Pepple exceeds the cost per page numbers I can remember from college. Wow.

Thankfully, I did NOT pay for this book – I was able to borrow it from my local library. I do feel sad, though, that anyone paid for this.

There are a couple nice diagrams wedged in the pages, but this is worse than a documentation dump from the various OpenStack sites. This is a sad example of an O’Reilly book – one I would never have dared think would have made it past their editor board, let alone be published for such an outrageous price.

There are also several amusing typos – including claiming that the test server he used for one deployment had a 1.4 Mhz CPU: Athlons were never measured below 600 Mhz that I can recall, and certainly the dual-core system he talked about should have been in Ghz.

At best, this is a published, overly-long blog post. At worst, it’s a pointless display of the hype surrounding “Cloud” – instead of giving lots of useful information, it’s stuck at the bare basics of the process, and frozen in time from more than a year ago! Given the rate of change in toolsets like this, there needs to not only be a lot more content in any printed work related to the technology, but also a planned cycle of releasing new editions – likely on the order of every year (or more) … especially in the early stages of a project/product.

Do yourself a HUGE favor: skip this book, and read the online documentation instead. You’ll be very glad you did.