This book’s stated audience is twofold: Ansible beginners and intermediate/expert users looking for code examples.

This is true, but with some very significant caveats.

The author’s style is patient but annoying, with a tendency to overly repeat hackneyed phrases. He also tends to give long checklists, followed by prose repeating the same points in paragraph form with slight additions. Much of the book feels like its genesis was a PowerPoint presentation, and the book contains both the text-heavy slides and the author’s notes.

I did not spot many overt typographical errors, but the writing style does show many awkwardnesses where an editor’s touch could have worked wonders. Also, at least in my PDF reviewer’s copy, the code formatting is awkward: too large and somewhat difficult to distinguish from the surrounding text.

By about page 20, I was ready to give up on this book. The combination of bad formatting and weak prose pushed me to believe that I’d like to find more useful information about Ansible online. At this point, had I been browsing in a bookstore, I would probably have abandoned the book.

But, alas, a reviewer’s life is not so easy. So, let’s take a closer look.

The book is 175 pages, divided into four chapters: “Ansible for Beginners with Examples,” “Installing Ansible,” “Ansible for VMware,” and “Closing Remarks.” Everything appears to be correct and detailed. But it is all information that is likely better found online.

The first chapter was very hard to read, mostly due to the formatting problems I mention above. To be fair, I hope that most of these will have been fixed in the print edition and maybe even in the final digital version. But there are other problems, too, mostly related to a lack of clarity about which parts of the code are to be taken literally and which are dummy tokens requiring substitution. The examples also lack key points referred to in the text, for example, the mention of strides on page 14.

The second chapter is actually quite good. It contains very detailed and well-organized instructions explaining how to install Ansible on any of the major Linux distros, Mac, or Windows. But it looks like it was written late 2022, probably at least a year before anyone will read this review. I assume that any real user will check online for the latest details. This book could have effectively included much less here, describing just key trouble spots and offering a link to official instructions.

The fourth chapter is just a few pages of summary fluff, leaving the bulk of the book in the third chapter.

The third chapter, “Ansible for VMware,” is the meat of the book at just over 100 pages. It gives detailed recipes for managing tasks such as building, running, modifying, and configuring VM instances. The only value I can see for this book is for readers who can’t find these recipes online and are looking for quick solutions to common tasks.