If you’re reading this, odds are good that you learned how to use Puppet at some point. So if you took a newbie sysadmin under your wing tomorrow, how would you suggest they learn Puppet? Or, to put yourself in the newbie’s shoes: if you wanted to learn Puppet, where would you look first?

There are a lot of options, ranging from a Puppet Labs training course to just grabbing the language
guide and a cheat sheet and diving in. But the first place many think to look is at the top of docs.puppetlabs.com, and what they’ve found missing is a clear on-ramp from beginnerhood to confidence. (Or, at least that’s what I found missing when I tried that.)

Which is why I’ve been itching to write a guide to learning Puppet since I joined Puppet Labs—I want it to be there when the next person like me goes looking. Today, I’m posting the first three sections of it!

Learning Puppet is a new section of the Puppet Labs documentation, and it includes guides, tutorials, exercises, and explanations of why things are the way they are. It also includes its own virtual machine with Puppet already installed and working, so beginners can experiment fearlessly and get comfortable with Puppet before learning how to install and troubleshoot it.

This is a work in progress, and it won’t take a beginner very far yet. But I plan to iterate pretty fast, and I’m eager for feedback. What do you wish someone had told you when you were first learning Puppet? What used to confuse you most? What should be in these first, early sections but got missed?

Please come on in, help warm the place up for the newcomers, and let me know what you think.

Also, speaking of cheat sheets:

Extend your memory with paper! We just finished the first in a series of Puppet cheat sheets to help make your life easier, one double-sided page at a time. This one covers the core resource types, and is available for download immediately — grab the two-page version or the expanded version today!

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