Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. The birds have been prized as a source of mineral wealth in Peru, hunted to extinction in the Arctic, trained by the Japanese to catch fish, demonized by Milton in Paradise Lost, and reviled, despised, and exterminated by sport and commercial fishermen from Israel to Indianapolis, Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. In The DevilÕs Cormorant, Richard King takes us back in time and around the world to show us the history, nature, ecology, and economy of the worldÕs most misunderstood waterfowl.

Get a hands-on introduction to the Chef, the configuration management tool for solving operations issues in enterprises large and small. Ideal for developers and sysadmins new to configuration management, this guide shows you to automate the packaging and delivery of applications in your infrastructure. You’ll be able to build (or rebuild) your infrastructure’s application stack in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. After teaching you how to write Ruby-based Chef code, this book walks you through different Chef tools and configuration management concepts in each chapter, using detailed examples throughout. All you need to get started is command-line experience and familiarity with basic system administration. Configure your Chef development environment and start writing recipes Create Chef cookbooks with recipes for each part of your infrastructure Use Test Kitchen to manage sandbox testing environments Manage single nodes with Chef client, and multiple nodes with Chef Server Use data bags for storing shared global data between nodes Simulate production Chef Server environments with Chef Zero Classify different types of services in your infrastructure with roles Model life stages of your application, including development, testing, staging, and production