Gadgetopia

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application: Nineteen dollars for the PDF. No print version.

Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it’s a book of ideas.

If anyone knows how to build a Web app, it’s these guys. Look for free sample chapters linked from the table of contents at the bottom of the page.

I liked the chapter title: “You don’t have scaling problems yet.” So true — so much time gets wasted of optimization before it’s needed.