1.1 …read this book

If I was being flippant I might say, “with your eyes” but I’m bigger than that so instead I will suggest some ways you might use this material.

This book is organised as a single narrative course centred around Salt. If you start on page one, read through each page and follow along with all the material, you should end up being proficient with Salt by the end.

This book contains mistakes. Deliberate mistakes (and no doubt some mistakes that I did not intend, that’s life). Sometimes we will do things more than once. WTF? In most educational material we are presented with ‘perfect’ solutions, this is not realistic. The real world sucks. It changes constantly and today’s ideal solution is okay but tomorrow the boss (or customer) decides new technology is desirable how do we handle this? This is were some soft skills may be required to persuade them to change their mind. Assuming we cannot persuade them to change we need to plan and execute a migration from the older solution to the new solution. Rather than avoid this sort of complexity this course takes it head on.

Don’t have time to follow along from the start? Perhaps you already know enough about Salt’s state system and feel confident skipping that material. No problem. At the start of each section you will find details of how to create an appropriate environment for that section (see §1.3). These ‘checkpoints’ also mean that if you mess up you can simply throw your environment away, recreate it using the closest checkpoint and continue with the course. In fact I encourage you to mess up your environment. You will learn much more by ‘playing’. So set up and environment, mess around with your own ideas and then, when you are ready to do the next part of the course, either restore your own saved snapshots or tear down the environment and build a new one using the provided checkpoint code.

Having difficulty? No problem. Ask for help. Someone in the community may help and since I am in the community I can also help clarify things. If enough people are confused by the material then obviously I messed up and need to rewrite that material to be more clear; it shall be done.