Mastering Redmine

Alastair posted his review on GoodReads and on Amazon:

I set up a Redmine install last year, and generally felt that the whole process was fairly smooth. The few hiccups I did have, however, won’t happen again, thanks to Andriy Lesyuk’s tremendously useful book!

The book covers everything, from the basics - where he expands on the sparse documentation that exists around installing Redmine and initial settings to look at and change, to the more advanced topics of personalization and customization. Although I took the hard route, by setting Redmine up using the existing instructions online, I am glad to have such a good reference for the day-to-day administration of the system, as well as customizing the workflow to suit the needs of me and my organization, for both personal and commercial projects. The author provides practival examples and helpful insights into all of the topics in which one would be interested as either a user or an administrator of a Redmine server.

As a previous reviewer noted, the grammar and sentence structure are a little off at times, but only to the extent that you might need to re-read a sentence or two. I wouldn’t say that it diminished my understanding of the topic or my interest in the book as a whole.

I fear that one of the later topics “Plugins Review” may become outdated rather quickly, but many of the plugins described by the author will continue to be useful long after they cease to be maintained. I was previously aware of Andriy as a plugin and theme author, but I was glad to find on reading the book that he does not set out to publicize only his own additions to the system, rather focusing on those which a Redmine user or administrator would find useful, even invaluable, for their installation. Certainly this is one thing I will take away from reading the book.

I came upon Redmine as a replacement for Trac, and while pleased with the system, found the lack of documentation on many fundamentals disturbing. Mastering Redmine really fills the gaps in Redmine’s documentation, and I am sure it will become one of the most referred-to books among administrators and users alike.

Thank you, Alastair, for this great review!

Alastair McFarlane is a developer from United Kingdom. Not much other information is known to me about Alastair, except that he uses Redmine.