This book is for anyone who builds and administers servers, especially in a web operations context. It requires some experience of Linux systems administration, including familiarity with the command line, file system, and text editing. No programming experience is required.
Thomas Uphill (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasuphill) is a long-time user of Puppet. He has presented Puppet tutorials at LOPSA-East, Cascada, and PuppetConf. He has also been a system administrator for over 20 years, working primarily with RedHat systems; he is currently a RedHat Certified Architect (RHCA). When not running the Puppet User Group of Seattle (PUGS), he volunteers for the LOPSA board and his local LOPSA chapter, SASAG. He blogs at http://ramblings.narrabilis.com.
John Arundel is a DevOps consultant, which means he helps people build world-class web operations teams and infrastructures and has fun doing it. He was formerly a senior operations engineer at global telco Verizon, designing resilient, high-performance infrastructures for major corporations such as Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He is now an independent consultant, working closely with selected clients to deliver web-scale performance and enterprise-grade resilience on a startup budget. He likes writing books, especially about Puppet (Puppet 2.7 Cookbook and Puppet 3 Cookbook are available from Packt). He also provides training and coaching on Puppet and DevOps, which, it turns out, is far harder than simply doing the work himself. Off the clock, he is a medal-winning, competitive rifle and pistol shooter and a decidedly uncompetitive piano player. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall, England and believes, like Cicero, that, if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need. You may like to follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.