Those aren't just the Ruby world's tools, fwiw.

We use Puppet at Disqus (a Python shop). Puppet and Chef are used by pretty much any modern web deployment that didn't already have a system in something more dated (cfengine? custom made?). At least that's the feeling I get.

I can't speak much to Chef but Puppet has great docs. You might just get an intro book for one or the other and dive in.