Foreword
The software development industry is going through a slow but real transformation. Software is increasingly a part of everything, and we, the software developers, are trying to cope with this exploding demand through more automation. I’d imagine you are reading this book because you are a part of that transformation.
To serve you better in this transformation, Jenkins is itself going through a major transformation of its own as well—from the world of “classic” Jenkins, where you configure Jenkins through a series of jobs from server-rendered GUI, to the world of “modern” Jenkins, where you configure Jenkins through Jenkinsfiles in Git repositories and look at results through a pleasant single-page application.
As we develop the modern Jenkins in the community and roll out these new features, I keep running into this challenge. Most users are simply unaware of this transformation that’s going on in Jenkins. People keep using Jenkins like they have been doing for years!
And to be fair, it made complete sense. On the one hand is people’s inertia and this massive body of information and knowledge accumulated in Google, Stack Overflow, our mailing lists, issue trackers, and so on that tells people how to effectively use Jenkins the “classic” way. On the other hand, we have the community that is, generally speaking, too busy building the “modern” Jenkins; and collectively not enough effort has been spent on telling people how to effectively use Jenkins the modern way.
So I was very happy to hear about this book, which really takes this challenge head on. In this book, Brent steps back and forgets everything we’ve known about Jenkins from the past decade. Then he goes on to reconstruct how Jenkins should be used today. Unlike Google, Stack Overflow, and so on, where knowledge is captured piecemeal, this book gives you a systematic path to explore the whole landscape, which makes it really valuable.
It’s an ideal book for those who are new to CI/CD, as well as those who have been using Jenkins for many years. This book will help you discover and rediscover Jenkins.
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