There is no doubt that 37signals have had a deep effect on the web development community. Most people didn’t wake up to their antics until relatively recently, but the truth is that they’ve been dishing out design tips and hacks on their Signal vs. Noise blog for a while now. In the last couple of years though, things have become a little… ‘funky’.

First, there was Basecamp a.k.a. the ‘anti-MS Project’ for project management. It was cute, handy, useful and for the market it was designed for (web designers) almost perfect. From that, they extracted the undercarriage and realised they had a framework for not just producing project management applications, but almost any web application - Ruby on Rails - which has gone on to be one of the biggest growing development frameworks on the planet. Vagueware (as in, me) now codes exclusively in Ruby and specialises in Rails development.

The products kept on rolling out - Ta-da, Backpack, Writeboard, Campfire - and the fandom got more and more intense. As a result there are now people known simply as ’37signals fanboys’ because no matter what the guys produce, there is a queue of people ready to hand over the cash. Sometimes people asked what the hell was the fuss about. Writeboard, is after all, nothing more than a text box with version control.

As a result of all this attention, expectations for their first venture into online book publishing as a company were a little mixed. Some people were thinking ‘same old stuff, re-hashed’ whilst the fans… well, let’s just say they were ready to replace various holy texts with copies.

You won’t find Getting Real in any bookshop. It’s available online-only as a downloadable PDF. Every copy watermarked with a ‘Specially prepared for (your name here)’ at the bottom of every page. This is an unusual way to enter the mainstream book market, but as their July 20 update shows, a more than profitable one.

So is it worth the $19 to buy? Well, I bought a copy ages ago, skim-read it, and didn’t get a chance to sit down and give it a thorough reading until this last weekend. I thought as I had finally given it some love, to share what I found.

First things first - there are 16 sections, each having between two to nine chapters, with an average of about seven or eight. Each chapter is quite light, and generally tends to expand a little on the title. As a result you could, in theory, just read the list of chapter titles and get a good idea of the best ideas from the book. Most chapters are less than two full pages long, and include quotes from Kathy Sierra and Seth Godin, so the real ‘meat’ is in the concepts, not in the writing.

In fact, I am reminded here of a part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the principal character describes reading with his son. He suggests reading a sentence - just one - and then stopping and thinking about it. Talking about it. Dissecting, pulling, morphing it. At the end of it all, decide how you feel about it and then move onto the next sentence. After you’ve read that sentence, stop, and analyse that as you did the previous one.

I tried reading like this once and it was an extraordinarily hard process, however I got a real insight into the material I hadn’t thought possible before. If I’m honest, if you look at the list of chapter headings, do the above, and you’re probably going to be able to get the core concepts down in your head without spending $19. That said, that’s an option for the poor - it’s not a lot of money, and the lazy would do best to save their mental energy and just shell out for the book.

Project management theories are all alike in one sense: they are codified common sense. PRINCE2 is basically a book that could be re-titled “Common Sense for Idiots” whilst agile is a way of letting developers work their own way whilst keeping management happy - mainly because management don’t think programmers have any sense whatsoever.

Getting Real is no different in this respect. It’s an “Agile-light” that concentrates on user experience above all else. However, it also stretches the boundaries of project management and touches on how to run a web product company in general. Sections that wouldn’t normally belong in a straight PM book include staffing, pricing and signup strategy, and how to keep customers happy would not belong in a traditional book on development methods.

It is also a book that is not meant to teach, but rather help you evangelise. It comes in a site license version (which at $49 is quite reasonable) so that you may spread the word amongst your team and help get the company on the same page. And that’s what this book is about - getting your team pulled together and heading in the same direction.

Project methodologies often concentrate on how best to document a project and how best to present that documentation within the team so that all concepts are clearly understood. Getting Real sets fire to that concept and suggests there is only one thing the business needs to worry about at any point in time: code that does what the customer expects.

To get a team to the point where they no longer need the traditional software lifecycle can take time and energy, and in many ways Getting Real can help short-circuit that. Reading it through with real-life examples can help convince you and your team that it’s at least worth a go - and that’s the biggest obstacle in changing any working style.

Some of the concepts do feel a little strange in places. For example, they suggest you should always have three people on the team: one developer, one designer, one person who can straddle both. This is just arbitrary and doesn’t make much sense. One programmer with design skills (or the money to get some if he can’t use OSWD or similar) could easily pull a project together with hard work - I should know - and a programmer with a designer on their own could easily do it. Where the third person steps in, I don’t know, or why it would be so dangerous to have four people, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this ‘three person’ set up is just the way 37signals handled things themselves internally.

Their staffing advice is also a little strange. How can you assess a designer based on a week’s work? I’d rather assess them on a lifetime of work. Same with a programmer, if I’m honest. I also understand the point they make in saying that good wordsmiths will be better communicators, but only if the primary form of commuication is written - if you’re spending most of your time coding in ‘alone time’ and it’s the pub conversations where the real team collaboration is worked out, the fact they can write in iambic pentameter isn’t going to help you one jot. I’d say: hire people who fit, regardless of wordsmith skills.

The overall push with this book is one of getting something out of the door as quickly as possible. Interestingly it suggests we develop simple solutions that work well instead of complex solutions that are in perpetual beta, and in this I find myself in wholesale agreement. We live in an age of Web 2.0 where getting anything that feels as though it might impress out of the door is seen as a greater acheivement than getting the right thing - just enough to get customers using the product and being surprised by it - out of the door.

Overall it’s a pleasant read, inspiring in places, and has practical knowledge that beginners could make use of if they’ve never worked on a software team before. For those of us who might be considered ‘old hands’ by now, I’d say it’s an interesting twist on how to get over the procrastination of starting your own software product line, and I intend to make use of a lot of the advice - but not all of it.

That said, you need everybody in your team to be signed up to it for it to work, and it will take time for people to adjust. For example, last week I had a discussion with somebody on a project who had read this book and wanted to work in the Getting Real style, but had to be held back from drawing an entity-relationship diagram as the first stage. It would seem that old habits die hard, and despite all the good intentions of Getting Real, might take some time to overcome even with the converts.