The cookbooks offered on the site are great and definitely huge time savers. Also, the documentation from Opscode is very in-depth and has been very helpful for learning.

That said, it seems very difficult (read: I haven’t succeeded yet) to find good actual implementation examples. Similarly to learning a new programming language where being able to look through source code is an excellent way to figure things out, the ability to look through actual site-cookbooks and custom configurations would help bridge the learning gap tremendously.

I understand server configurations tend to be sensitive (which is probably a big part of why people don’t seem to be sharing them online,) but that unfortunately means there’s a shortage of examples for learning, and sometimes a single good example is worth a thousand lines of documentation.

Offering a sample repo with (for example) full ground-up configuration for a LAMP server running a web app or two would be a practical and extremely valuable way to get an idea of the whole workflow of Chef.

(p.s. if anyone knows of any good resources like this, please link!)