If you are a computer user of any type, you rely on automation every day. Their ability to automate things is what makes computers useful, after all. Nobody adds up the columns in a spreadsheet by hand; we all let a formula do it for us. And instead of getting up in the middle of the night to rotate log files, a system administrator sets an automated job to do it. In fact, if you are a system administrator, you should rely much more on automation than any other type of computer user. If you take care of only a few machines, doing things by hand is perhaps not so bad—you can easily perform most necessary tasks by hand. But as the number of machines under your control grows, keeping them in working order, in a consistent st....