I also bought the book to compare puppet/chef/ansible/salt. If you are interested in learning about puppet (or any of these), I would highly recommend using something like Vagrant to herd virtual machines into example configurations. I have been using puppet for over a year and I have found this configuration to be extremely helpful for testing new scripts. Vagrant knows about puppet/chef/ansible, so you do not even need to install the client software, just point vagrant at your scripts!

I have put together a couple screencasts about Vagrant [1] and Learning puppet with Vagrant [2]. Hope you find these helpful.

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

[2] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag...