Getting Real: free 37signals book on building a successful webapp | Hacker News Reader

Getting Real: free 37signals book on building a successful webapp

gettingreal.37signals.com

65 pointsclyfe17 comments

Also know by myself as The Bible. Its new version, Rework, has been by the bed since it was released. Really inspiring book even if you don't agree with everything, it shows you a different view of lots of interesting topics in an easy to read way. Highly recommended.

I've started reading it yesterday on my kindle (which made it really much easier to read), and I'm almost through it. It's two-three hours long, and it's a good read (it feels like short blog posts aggregated in a book). Is Getting Real that much different from it? I can't find it in epub format, sadly...

It's basically the same thing. Think of Rework as the extended edition of Getting Real.

Ah, thanks, so I don't need to read Getting Real if I've already read Rework (I've skimmed Getting Real and it seems to be mostly the same thing).

Excellent book, although slightly surprising that the inventors of Ruby on Rails are using PHP to serve the content.

We used PHP to serve up a couple of includes. That tech was implemented before Rails was born. It works so there's no reason to change it.

Thanks, I assumed it would have been for a pragmatic reason

At the time this book was written, 37Signals couldn't keep a Rails stack running for more than a few hours yet, according to that old rant by Zed Shaw.

When Zed Shaw wrote that rant 37signals already had thousands of customers for its Rails apps (plural).

That does not make his statement false. It said they were restarting servers all day to keep it running. Maybe they didn't feel the need to add their book to that maintenance mess.

There's no reason to try to cover up the fragility of the early Rails web stack. That's in the past. It's much more stable today, with many more choices of software at all layers, than it was in 2006.

I think it's far-fatched to suggest that the "maintenance mess" of hosting static content with Rails alongside what were then the most demanding Rails apps deployed anywhere caused them to look to PHP. I also think you're being pointlessly snarky.

They used PHP in several places, mostly presentational pages, where the only thing needed were some "includes". Most of these today are replaced by brochure [1], but the legacy remains.

[1] https://github.com/sstephenson/brochure

Having it in Kindle format would have been nice (also, Instapaper needs some recursive option).

This book was a very entertaining read. The chapters are one page long, which is perfect even if you only have 1 minute free.

Sorry but Basecamp is utter crap.

Great Books (getting real & rework), I like the kick-ass, cut the crap style of focusing what is important.

And suddenly people realized they can sell software as a service.

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