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Mastering Redmine
Mastering Redmine
- GenresManagementSoftware
366 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 23, 2013
Mastering Redmine is useful for administrators who want to tune Redmine to the specific needs of their organizations. Almost all aspects of administering are covered. Also, the book is a guide for daily usage for end user. I have used Redmine since October 2010 as an administrator and an user, have collected much experience and nevertheless learned many things.
It would be good idea Mastering Redmine to have new editions when Redmine releases new versions.
It would be good idea Mastering Redmine to have new editions when Redmine releases new versions.
April 30, 2013
Redmine is one of my all time favorite tools for managing programming projects. When Packt Publishing asked if I was interested in reviewing a copy, I jumped at the chance!
Mastering Redmine by Andriy Lesyuk covers the massive amount of functionality provided by Redmine with enough depth to get new users off and managing projects on their own installation. He begins the book with an overview of Redmine and a brief walkthrough of the user interface. This is followed by discussions on the different databases, web servers, and source control systems that can be used with Redmine. He also provides comparisons with ChiliProject (a fork of Redmine) in a very fair and unbiased way.
Chapter 2 covers installing Redmine. Redmine is a complicated piece of software and a lot of people give up before they even get it to run. This chapter covers just about every possible way to install Redmine to ensure that one of them will be appropriate for your environment. He seems to prefer using Linux and a package manager to keep things easy. Personally, I never liked this approach for Redmine. You end up with very outdated software that is hard to extend with plugins later. Fortunately, the next section covers installation using the source packages. For the less adventurous, he covers the various pre-packaged options available for installation.
Up next is configuration. There is a lot more depth to Redmine than the initial glance leads you to believe. The book walks the reader through the initial setup in an orderly fashion and covers everything needed to get a basic system up and running properly.
Chapters 4 through 9 are the meat of this book. They go step-by-step through the main Redmine features, explaining each along the way. Issue Tracking, Managing Projects, Time Tracking, Text Formatting for the wiki, Access Controls, Workflow, and personalizing the system to help get more out of it more efficiently. These chapters are very user-focused and are beneficial for anyone interested in using Redmine. They contain enough screenshots to keep things clear and enough detail to make the reader comfortable with the material.
Chapter 10 covers extending Redmine with plugins and themes. Several examples are given, but it never dives in too deep. More on that in a bit.
The last chapter discusses customizing Redmine. Most Redmine features allow you to add custom fields, your own enumerations for items in drop-down lists, etc. This chapter provides a good look at the options available and how to use them to tweak Redmine to fit your needs.
Overall, this is a really good book. It lives up to the quality I’ve come to expect of Packt Publishing. If you are unfamiliar with Redmine or installing complex software, the time this book will save you more than makes up for the cover price (which is not at all unreasonable for a technical book).
However, it’s not without a few problems that, I hope, will be addressed in future revisions or additional books on the subject. First, while it does not detract from the information provided, it’s very obvious that Mr. Lesyuk is not a native English speaker. Some sentence structures and word choices are odd and will likely make you re-read a few lines every now and then. His writing is quite good and clear but some people may be put off so I mention it.
A bigger problem with the book is the lack of in-depth technical information. As I mentioned before, Redmine is a complex piece of software. When things don’t work it’s often very difficult to figure out why. There is no help here for troubleshooting. Extending Redmine with plugins is a very hit-and-miss affair, and again, there’s no help to be found. A lot of plugins require configuration to be done outside the Redmine web interface. More often than not, add-on themes need some minor cleanup before they are usable. A brief overview of these issues would be beneficial.
Also lacking are details on advanced source control integration. The book does a good job integrating existing source repositories with Redmine but doesn’t even mention extending Redmine to actually manage these repositories. With the current “hotness” being GIT, a chapter on integrating Gitolite using the GIT Hosting Plugin would benefit many readers.
The most serious problem however, is there is absolutely no information related to upgrading an existing Redmine installation to a new version. This is a major omission. Upgrading has many “gotchas” that are only learned through trial and error. Even a short chapter covering backing up and restoring a Redmine installation would go a long way towards preventing disaster when it’s time to roll out a new version. Even worse, there are no warnings about issues faced when upgrading from an appliance or stack installation. In some cases, choices made during installation will come back to haunt you – possibly even requiring the total reinstallation of Redmine with no obvious/easy way to migrate existing data.
I hate to end on a down-note. The book really is very good and I recommend it to the less technical among us. Linux administrators with experience using similar systems will find some benefit here, but it’s really targeted at managers, testers, or developers who need a system like Redmine but lack the know-how to install it and use it on their own. If that’s you, or someone you work with, grab this book today.
Mastering Redmine by Andriy Lesyuk covers the massive amount of functionality provided by Redmine with enough depth to get new users off and managing projects on their own installation. He begins the book with an overview of Redmine and a brief walkthrough of the user interface. This is followed by discussions on the different databases, web servers, and source control systems that can be used with Redmine. He also provides comparisons with ChiliProject (a fork of Redmine) in a very fair and unbiased way.
Chapter 2 covers installing Redmine. Redmine is a complicated piece of software and a lot of people give up before they even get it to run. This chapter covers just about every possible way to install Redmine to ensure that one of them will be appropriate for your environment. He seems to prefer using Linux and a package manager to keep things easy. Personally, I never liked this approach for Redmine. You end up with very outdated software that is hard to extend with plugins later. Fortunately, the next section covers installation using the source packages. For the less adventurous, he covers the various pre-packaged options available for installation.
Up next is configuration. There is a lot more depth to Redmine than the initial glance leads you to believe. The book walks the reader through the initial setup in an orderly fashion and covers everything needed to get a basic system up and running properly.
Chapters 4 through 9 are the meat of this book. They go step-by-step through the main Redmine features, explaining each along the way. Issue Tracking, Managing Projects, Time Tracking, Text Formatting for the wiki, Access Controls, Workflow, and personalizing the system to help get more out of it more efficiently. These chapters are very user-focused and are beneficial for anyone interested in using Redmine. They contain enough screenshots to keep things clear and enough detail to make the reader comfortable with the material.
Chapter 10 covers extending Redmine with plugins and themes. Several examples are given, but it never dives in too deep. More on that in a bit.
The last chapter discusses customizing Redmine. Most Redmine features allow you to add custom fields, your own enumerations for items in drop-down lists, etc. This chapter provides a good look at the options available and how to use them to tweak Redmine to fit your needs.
Overall, this is a really good book. It lives up to the quality I’ve come to expect of Packt Publishing. If you are unfamiliar with Redmine or installing complex software, the time this book will save you more than makes up for the cover price (which is not at all unreasonable for a technical book).
However, it’s not without a few problems that, I hope, will be addressed in future revisions or additional books on the subject. First, while it does not detract from the information provided, it’s very obvious that Mr. Lesyuk is not a native English speaker. Some sentence structures and word choices are odd and will likely make you re-read a few lines every now and then. His writing is quite good and clear but some people may be put off so I mention it.
A bigger problem with the book is the lack of in-depth technical information. As I mentioned before, Redmine is a complex piece of software. When things don’t work it’s often very difficult to figure out why. There is no help here for troubleshooting. Extending Redmine with plugins is a very hit-and-miss affair, and again, there’s no help to be found. A lot of plugins require configuration to be done outside the Redmine web interface. More often than not, add-on themes need some minor cleanup before they are usable. A brief overview of these issues would be beneficial.
Also lacking are details on advanced source control integration. The book does a good job integrating existing source repositories with Redmine but doesn’t even mention extending Redmine to actually manage these repositories. With the current “hotness” being GIT, a chapter on integrating Gitolite using the GIT Hosting Plugin would benefit many readers.
The most serious problem however, is there is absolutely no information related to upgrading an existing Redmine installation to a new version. This is a major omission. Upgrading has many “gotchas” that are only learned through trial and error. Even a short chapter covering backing up and restoring a Redmine installation would go a long way towards preventing disaster when it’s time to roll out a new version. Even worse, there are no warnings about issues faced when upgrading from an appliance or stack installation. In some cases, choices made during installation will come back to haunt you – possibly even requiring the total reinstallation of Redmine with no obvious/easy way to migrate existing data.
I hate to end on a down-note. The book really is very good and I recommend it to the less technical among us. Linux administrators with experience using similar systems will find some benefit here, but it’s really targeted at managers, testers, or developers who need a system like Redmine but lack the know-how to install it and use it on their own. If that’s you, or someone you work with, grab this book today.
March 2, 2018
Quick review at https://martin.atlassian.net/wiki/spa....
April 4, 2013
It was a big hole not having a book for such a nice and solid project management system around but finally, first (as far as I know) Redmine book is on the market. Dear Andriy (also owner of a lot of plugins for Redmine and kind person) recently wrote the first book about Redmine. Congratulations again :).
Let me cut short and talk a little bit about the book. I'm Redmine administrator and user for years and I learnt a lot of things about Redmine from blogs, redmine.org, forums etc. But after the book, I said myself that I had a lot to learn (Especially from Andriy) The book gives you more than introducing you the Redmine but especially and the most important part, Andriy's experiences. The most important thing must be in a book (Hey, I'm not talking about story books :) ) is the authors' experience in my opinion because in the computer world, experience means time and time means money :).
The book does not cover only functionalities of Redmine but also how to use them in an effective manner. Of course, you will be able to install it after reading the book but most important part is to learn how to use Redmine. I would like to make a tiny criticism at this point. The book teaches you how to install Redmine on a Ubuntu system by repositories or some bundles. It would be very nice to touch on how to install it locally on a Linux machine; particularly for those who runs/would like to run their Redmine copies on shared servers and does not have administrative rights. I was really confused in my first times how to install Redmine on a shared server. There were a lot of dirty info around and this kind of info would be very valuable for me.
The book persistently emphasize the time tracking features of Redmine, particularly, reserving a chapter for this. This is another best feature of the book besides authors' valuable experiences because it's most powerful side (but rarely used even by me) of Redmine. Also let me add that you are not limited only for the stock functionalities of Redmine. Andriy mentions about the plugins that makes Redmine exceeds your expectations. I can not imagine Redmine without plugins and you can find most useful plugins for Redmine and how to use them. I want to mention here that I love the plugins By Andriy and thanks for them. Personalization chapter was my second favorite in the book and teaches exactly how you use Redmine much more effectively and configure it according to your own needs. Meanwhile, I can guarantee that you will find answers to all of your questions about Source Control Management and Redmine integration.
The book Mastering Redmine addresses not only Redmine users, but also administrators and perhaps plugin developers. You can absolutely find a thing to learn in the book and every person deals with Redmine must have this book in the library. Also Everybody knows that profit is not high especially for software books, so let me add that I appreciated packtpub that they support those kind of new software books. You can buy the book from Amazon or prefer to check out the book on packtpub.
January 24, 2015
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.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
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.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
April 17, 2013
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.
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.
March 25, 2015
Mastering Redmine is a book full of tips and tricks regarding Redmine. It is very useful for people who want to set up Redmine in their organizations, either small or big companies. A lot of customizations are covered along the book.
Since most people use redmine as a Agile Project Management System, i think the book could have given a little more emphasys in this subject. But it is a great book indeed.
Since most people use redmine as a Agile Project Management System, i think the book could have given a little more emphasys in this subject. But it is a great book indeed.
October 8, 2014
This is, without a doubt, the worst technical book I have ever read. It is poorly written and nearly technically useless. It is like someone took amateur web documentation and bound it in book form. Don't waste your time or money.
September 17, 2013
A good documentation of Redmine.
January 25, 2016
More info than I'll ever need, but pretty helpful.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews