The Heroku Hacker's Guide | Hacker News Reader

The Heroku Hacker's Guide

rdegges.com

137 pointsgoogletron43 comments

I respect the "If you don't have enough money for this, I will give it to you for free" notion. However, given that that policy should totally resolve all of your moral qualms about charging proper prices, this should probably cost $25 ~ $50, which will a) compensate the author better, b) underwrite more giveaways (either of this book or of other projects), and c) ensure that among purchasers of the book it gets treated as a valuable resource rather than as a disposable impulse-buy. (You can add to this the somewhat shocking observation that you may actually sell more copies.)

I completely understand this, and believe it to be true.

My motivation for writing the book was primarily to get the information out there. I really love the Heroku platform, and would like to spread the knowledge around as much as possible. Charging for this book was really a way for me to recover a tiny amount of my time back, I have no intentions of really turning a profit from this.

After some feedback I set the pricing to be variable (5$+), and I've been giving away free copies to anyone who asked.

So far, the project has been a success (in my mind): over 600 copies distributed total, which means a large amount of users get to (hopefully) make use of the information :)

Hey author! Charge more! $5 is seriously undervaluing your product.

P.S I bought it. It's 61 pages of great material. Go give this guy some money.

I got the ebook and print book based off the reviews in here. I'm pretty excited to give this a read tonight. :)

Yeah, he should charge $9 or more, $9 is the new black.

So I hopped on over here (after I bought the book) to make this one comment, the price is too low!

Seriously, the amount of value I've already gotten out of this book today well exceeds the $5 buy-in.

I'm not saying to raise it straight to the "typical" $27 e-book level, but I wouldn't have thought twice paying $12 for this. In fact, at $5, you're doing yourself a disservice and signaling a lack of quality.

Hey thanks for the comment! I'm the author.

I'm extremely flattered by your comment. I didn't really think about pricing it any higher than 5$. Will definitely reconsider.

Really appreciate the feedback.

To add another datapoint, $10-15 is typically fair in my book. Basically for unknown content, the price of a decent lunch or a cheap dinner seems reasonable.

The key to getting a higher price is to "derisk" the investment for people. Demonstrate value with table of content, links to previous blog posts maybe a free chapter of intermediate level (not to basic to make the book seem trivial, but not so advanced as to not be understandable and useful without context).

Books with code in a github repo are worth more to me. The most valuable are those that go as far as to create an immersive environment for learning and experimenting with the concepts. Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent Javascript book is one of the few that has achieved this with the console/repl that accompanies the book and is integrated with the example code in the text.

I also think $5 is way too cheap for your ebook. OK I understand you don't want to turn a profit. But price is not only for you. It is also for the market. It is viewed by customers/users as a quality element. Low price = Ho! That's just a tiny ebook = Why should I care? (I bought it, looks very interesting)

Is there any type of preview or table of contents available? It would be nice to get a better feel for the contents and style of the book.

Hi there, I'm the book's author. I don't have any preview available, but here's the table of contents:

Preface

- Why Heroku?

- Simplicity

- Age

- Popularity

- Polyglot

- Solid

- Best Practices

Getting Started with Heroku

- Create an Account

- Install the Toolbelt

- Install heroku-accounts

- Project Prerequisites

- Create an Application

- Follow the Required Quickstart Guide

- Push Your Code

- Check it Out

Dynosaurs

- What Are Dynos?

- Understanding Dynos

- Dynos Run Services

- One Procfile to Rule Them All

- Testing Your Procfile

- Scaling Up and Scaling Down Dynos

- Handling Failure

- Calculating Dyno Costs

The Environment

- Best Practices and You

- The Config Command

- Benefits

Take the Pain Away (with Addons)

- What are Addons?

- How do Addons Work?

- The Addon Catalogue

- Adding, Removing, Upgrading, and Downgrading Addons

- Addon Cost

PostgreSQL Patterns

- Why Heroku PostgreSQL?

- Bootstrapping a Database

- Connecting to Your Database

- Destroying a Database

- Creating Read Slaves

- Creating a Duplicate Database

- Promoting a Slave Database to a Master Database

- View Slow Queries

- Backing Up Your Database

- Downloading Your Backups

- Restoring From a Backup

- Final Thoughts

Caching with Memcached

- Why Cache?

- Using Memcached

- Memcached on Heroku

Scheduling Tasks with Cron

- The Scheduler

- Debugging

- Cost

Logging

- Log Types

- Viewing Logs

- Viewing Select Logs

- When to Check Your Logs

- Log Storage Options

Monitoring with New Relic

- Why New Relic?

- Installing New Relic

- The Overview

- A Visual Map of Your Application

- Web Transactions

- Database Monitoring

- External Services

- Dyno Monitoring

- Background Tasks

- Final Thoughts

Talking to the World

- Using Custom Domains

- Updating Your DNS

- Encrypt All the Things! (with SSL)

Managing Releases

- Heroku’s Model

- Viewing Your Releases

- Rolling Back

- Final Thoughts

Working with Others

- Who is the Application Owner?

- Sharing Access

- Sharing Permissions

- Managing Collaborators

- Transferring Ownership

Do Great Things

- Build Services, Not Apps

- Building Service Oriented Applications

- Heroku and Services

- Be Dynamic

- Final Thoughts

References and Further Reading

Special Thanks

A sample chapter would be great. Lacking it I've just bought it for $5. I will buy it again after reading if I liked it.

I agree, an excerpt or two would be a great help deciding whether the book is for me (this is something that I think PragProg does well).

Hey, if you'd like a preview I'd be happy to email you a free copy (don't have any preview stuff setup yet). If you email me (rdegges@gmail.com) I'd love to send you a copy :)

The author got me started on Heroku at a Hackathon. He knows his stuff and is good at answering questions. Glad to see him published!

Heroku has really been amazing for me. As a college student its free and very cheap upgrade plans make it extremely easy to deploy web apps. It's helped my learning process and allowed me to release stuff I don't think I ever would just because of its ease of use.

I couldn't buy the book earlier so I emailed the creator and he generously gave me the book for free (DRM free to boot!). I took a quick look through it before my last class and so far am loving it (yummm free quality content!). Thanks again Randall!

Gumroad was down, so rdegges emailed a preview to me. After a quick skim of the preview, I checked and gumroad was back. The book is definitely worth at least $1 / chapter to me, so I contributed $15. I'm looking forward to digging in.

After buying the ebook and taking a browse, I agree with the others. As a first-time web developer who has been using Heroku for a few months, I would gladly pay more than $5 for this now (and even more a few months ago).

Skimmed it through -- very, very useful for me! Will be using it to deploy my first real Heroku project this week. Author was also very responsive via email. For 5$ it's a no-brainer if you want to start using Heroku.

$9 isn't the new black, variable pricing is. Happy to spend (and write off) more to learn some new stuff and support projects like this. I'd love to see a blog post about the pricing in a few weeks / months.

Just bought it -- thanks for all the hard work. I'm a long-time and high-scale App Engine user and now have a couple small but growing projects running on Heroku. I like a lot of what I see!

Is this book appropriate for someone who has never used Heroku before or is it geared toward folks who have beginner-level experience with it?

Both (I'm the author). It covers Heroku from the ground up. I've had people of many different skill levels review the book, and so far its had extremely positive feedback.

If you're on the fence, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll give you a copy for free :)

Been following you on Twitter. Raise your price to cover that one-time use suit! But seriously, the book is well worth more than a fiver.

Just updated the gumroad payment page so it now allows users to pay more than 5$ if they want to. :)

anybody else buy this and can't download it? hnews flood brings another server to it's knees.

it's cool that the part that takes your payment information works great, but the part that allows you to download what you paid for no worky. urge to kill rising...

UPDATE!! the author is a cool cat and sent me a copy via email like 30seconds after i let him know i was having problems. HAPPY CUSTOMER!!

Hey there, I'm using Gumroad to accept payment / etc. If for some reason you can't download the book, let me know and I'll email you a copy personally.

Sorry for the issues!

You can also email me if you prefer: rdegges@gmail.com

Can you add a table of contents with brief chapter descriptions? It's not clear what the breadth and depth of the content is.

I've gladly paid twice the price of the book based on the reviews here. Can't wait to read it, keep it up with the good work.

Tried three different credit cards. Two visas and one Mastercard. It says it can't verify my cards. Anyone seeing that?

Hey, sorry about the issues. Not sure if it is gumroad or what. I'll be happy to send you a copy of the ebook if you'd like, just send me an email: rdegges@gmail.com

Thanks for replying. Sent you an email! The book looks really good!

Cool, I picked up a copy! What technology did you use to write the book in? AsciiDoc, Markdown?

Wrote the book using Sphinx. If I had to do it over again, I'd likely use Markdown + custom tools. I'm actually planning to write a blog post about this next week some time :)

Anyone else having trouble getting the payment screen to work?

I was but was also able to check out anyway. I emailed a screenshot to gumroad's support address.

is there a kindle version of the book or just pdf?

Right now there's just a PDF, but I'm working on getting it into the kindle store. If you'd like a PDF before the Kindle copy comes out, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll send you a free one to hold you over :)

I was actually about to ask the same question. I haven't seen the book but I expect it contains a lot of command line snippets and code, and in my experience the Kindle does a ... shall we say unsatisfactory job of rendering those.

looks pretty decent!

Question, is the $15 price difference between the pdf and paperback the money the publisher is charging you?

on my way of buying the pdf right now

A+++ Would read again.

Can't wait to read it!

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