This is my first book. When Packt Publishing asked me to write a book about Puppet, I was surprised, flattered, and intrigued. The idea of sharing my experience about this wonderful tool was really attractive.

I have been using Puppet for seven years. I have loved it since the beginning.

I have seen a great community of people doing wonderful things with it, and I tried to credit as many people as possible, knowing that many worthy contributors have been forgotten.

I have assisted in its evolution and the tumultuous growth of the company behind it, Puppet Labs.

I have definitely not seen any attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but I think I have gathered enough experience about Puppet to have valuable things to write about and share.

Please forgive my approximate grasp of the language; if you are a native English speaker, you will surely find some sentences weird or just wrong.

I tried to avoid the temptation to build phrases based on my mother language constructs; I believe I have failed in more than one place.

Various people have helped me with suggestions and corrections; they couldn't solve all my language idiosyncrasies and content limitations, but their input has been very important to make this book better.

I'd like to thank in particular Brice Figureau, Joshua Hoblitt, and Azharuddin Sheikh for the invaluable help and corrections, and Nigel Kersten, Jon Forrest, Calogero Bonasia, Monica Colangelo, and Kartik Vedam for the precious suggestions.

A big hug to Chiara, who is always patient and supportive, and to all my family, even the younger one who is extremely skilled in kicking me out of the bed, encouraging early morning writing sessions.

It's time to enjoy some more weekends together, finally.