‘Getting Real’ in web application development
There’s a great book referred to me by a friend called ‘Getting Real’ by that great web development firm 37 Signals, masters of Rails, and creators of some fantastic web 2.0 applications.
A fairly short read, it is nontheless packed with incredible wisdom on how web applications need to be developed. Out goes the conventional system of huge scope documents and endless meetings to decide on the feature set - in’Getting Real’ they very clearly lay out a system that allows you, the developer, to get a application built and live in the shortest possible time.
The current system of developing web applications has come from the offline software development field where a new, updated version any software is released every 2 years or so. The advantage with web applications is that new features can be added/removed/tweaked at any point even when running live. This makes web applications very flexible and further agility can be achieved by not getting caught up in minor details that push the launch of an app back by months and sometimes years. The philosophy is launch now and tweak later.
You can read the book for free on the 37 Signals web site or buy either the pdf or physical book. Check it all out at http://getreal.37signals.com/
