Cookbooks is a project mainly written in RUBY and SHELL, it's free.
This is a blank repository you can use as a starting point for your local chef configuration.
There have been massive modifications to the rake tasks and therefore chefs upstream Rakefile is not used anymore.
There are 3 groups of rake tasks:
For full details on the parts aside from information contained in the README files, see the Chef wiki documentation at:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home