Getting Real - by 37signals
After a few weeks I decided to start reading "Getting Real" from 37signals. I bought the book when I read about it on a blog from Scott Berkun (Why Requirements Stink) .
I started in the morning and read it from cover to cover in a few hours.
The book does a fabulous job in creating a 'think small and easy' mind-set. And it does so without going in too much detail. Every chapter is relatively small and gets to the point quickly. After every chapter I got the feeling that I wanted to put the theory into practice and start right away. But moreover it made me wanna read the next chapter and find out more (which ultimately resulted into me reading it from cover to cover in one read).
As stated in the introduction, a lot of the principles and methods are not thought up by 37signals themselves. They borowed a few here and there and added their own sauce to create a 'methodology' which is very suitable for themselves. Although they state things as being a fact, they never force things on you. They just point out the way they do it and why it helped them to achiever their goals.
The book made me realise again how 'easy' it is to start a web application and do it right but without all the fuss of elaborate planning, specifications, etc, etc.
Another side-effect of reading the book is that I wanted to blog about it again, and it resulted in me writing 3 blog posts today. I just wanted to get it all out of my system, and get it out of there right away. True, there may be typo's and grammatical errors in some of the posts, but it is the web! When someone points them out they are realy easy to fix. Thats the way the Internet works! 