Mastering Redmine

Jascha posted the review on his blog, on GoodReads and on Amazon:

I’ve got this book in my hands by necessity, since Redmine was the choice to manage several important projects I was in. I must admit that Mastering Redmine kept me entertained for some three days, during the daily commute. The eleven chapters cover whatever you need to get started, from installation up to customization, passing through the many flavors of administration.

On the contrary of the most of IT books out there, that come with no images or, worse, with quickly made ugly black and white schemas, Mastering Redmine explains the concepts wonderfully coupling words and colorful images. Great value for the reader, mainly if he’s new to Redmine since this allows him to visibly match his screen and the text.

The book can be divided into three main parts: installation, configuration and customization. Not only each comes with all the information you need to get the system up and running. The author also touches subjects such as using the BitNami Redmine stack, integrating Redmine with LDAP or coupling it with the repositories associated to the project itself.

But that’s not all!

Each chapter comes with best practices, useful tips and insights from the author experience that should make our life easier. A delicious extra is a practical example where he shows us how to configure Redmine to satisfy Kanban‘s task rotation practices. Nice!

Enough with the praises. I’m pretty much happy with this book, but there’s something that could/should have been done better: setting up Redmine completely from the source.

Now, when I say completley I mean the whole thing, not just Redmine. If you plan to use Redmine on Nginx and plan to do it through Phusion Passenger then you must be aware that you need to build Nginx itself from the source.

Fine, this book is about Redmine, if you have problems with Nginx bla bla… Well, it took me some good thirty minutes to get a Debian EC2 instance with Nginx, Passenger and Redmine working smoothly together, building all from the source. It was a half a hour well spent, which could result in a post in my blog, but still, the author could take this into account for the next release.

But well, that would be ice on the cake.

This is a wonderful review! Thanks, Jascha!

Jascha Casadio is a inquisitive person and a manager at Gameloft from Barcelona, Spain. He speaks 6 (wow!) human languages! You can check Jascha’s website here (there is a great article about installing Redmine, Nginx and Passenger from sources there).