If what you want is a bok that's a cross platform as the title suggests, this might not be a book worth buying. Examples in this book make horrible assumptions, along the lines of removing all native commands and replacing them with GNU commands. In a Linux only environment, this may not be a problem. In many other environments where enterprise level support isn't a concern, this may also be acceptable. But the place where automation is needed the most is the larget enterprise production environments. While ideas and basic tennets outlined in this book are what you ultimately need, the scope of the examples have problems scaling beyond 20-100 systems, let alone 5,000+. As for the basic tennets, you can cheat and be reminded what they are: common configurations, keep good documentation as to the differences, and manage systems, in a secure manner, in a common fashion that relies on the common configuration and documented differences.
The errors and ommissions in this book should be easily caught by any technical senior administrator of the OSes in question. For me, that's Solaris and Linux.
For a Linux only environment, it is a solid book. The writing style is drier than most of the manuals I read from various Unix/Linux vendors, and truly is the first tech publication since I supported PBX systems to put me to sleep.
As for the "subjective" analysis of various tools to assist in automation, I was highly disappointed. On various occasions, only 2 or 3 tools were discussed in an attempt to make the assesments fair. In each case, I came up with twice as many tools that I use on a regular basis, that were also F/OSS (as was usually the criteria the author used to talk about a product) that perform similar, if not identical, tasks much better. And those tools aren't that new: most predate the tools he refers to. Plus, most Linux distributions come with them installed and configured by default!
Since all I got out of the book were the above tennets that I already have known for the past 10+ years, I was VERY disappointed. Just make sure you know who you're letting borrow your copy, and what is expected that they'll take away, otherwise you'll end up with junior admins scripting their way into destroying your enterprise.