I really liked reading this clear and progressive book by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin published by Pragmatic Programmers. The chosen analogy “moving into a new house” helps to understand why it is a good idea to automate server handling and web deployment. The main parts are
“bootstrap subversion” chapter on version control
hosting environments on shared and dedicated hosts.
The chapter on capistrano is the only printed documentation on that tool by now.
Capistrano offers default deployment “tasks” for Ruby on Rails, but can be adopted e.g. for PHP Projects or admin tasks like key deployment, installation/compilation of software. Commands get pushed to servers in bash syntax via SSH in parallel. The servers can be grouped in “roles” like “web”, “db”, “all” or “most fancy customer”.
I found a nice text called The Researcher’s Bible by Alan Bundy (not Al Bundy for sure). He wrote this document about reading & writing skills, finding a decent topic, common pitfalls.
Alan Bundy seems to know what he is talking about and was Head of the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 1998-2001. Students like him, they wrote this Liber Amoricum:
The film was sponsored by dmc, Cisco & Otto, broadcasted in german TV on 3sat and ZDF. It will be “reloaded” tomorrow 31.07.2008 13.30h on ZDF-infokanal.
