# My Heroku Book is Finished

By Randall Degges · September 10, 2012 · https://rdegges.com/2012/my-heroku-book-is-finished/

> I finished The Heroku Hacker's Guide, a practical book on using and understanding Heroku, out now as a PDF and paperback. Here's why I wrote it.

![The Heroku Hacker's Guide Cover][]


I wrote [a book][] on Heroku!  It's called **The Heroku Hacker's Guide**, and
you can buy it (right now!) in both e-book (PDF) and paperback formats on the
new book website: [http://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/][a book].

If you've read my blog, you know I tend to talk a lot about web applications,
infrastructure, and best practices.  My real passion as a developer (and
startup guy) has always been building things.  I love creating new products,
services, and APIs.  I love working on open source code.  And I *really* love
deploying my code to simple platforms that encourage me to write good code, and
allow me to grow my applications as I please.

Since first using [Heroku][], I've been incredibly impressed over and over
again by their product, service, and culture.  Not only has it been incredibly
simple and straightforward to deploy my web applications on Heroku's platform--
it has been *enjoyable*.

Over my years working on and building web applications, I've done all sorts of
devops work.  I've built continuous integration and deployment systems.  I've
written [puppet][] modules to bootstrap software services.  I've spent time
writing [Rackspace][] and [EC2][] auto-provisioning scripts that boot new
servers and kickstart software configurations.  I've learned how to
automatically load balance incoming HTTP requests.  All in all, I've spent
thousands of hours building fail-safe web services.

But I can tell you now that the *single most effective thing* I ever did to
free up my time and let me do what I love (build things) was to start using
Heroku.

In my opinion, Heroku has gotten things right.  They've built a
platform-as-a-service company that encourages [best practices][] development,
and gives you all the tools and transparency you need to deploy amazing
software that people love.  Outside their product, Heroku is filled with
amazing people doing amazing things.  They actively build and release open
source software (look at their [GitHub account][]), they hire [amazing][]
[people][] that build [amazing][foreman] [things][], and they genuinely care
about their users.

My new book, [The Heroku Hacker's Guide][a book], aims to be a practical guide
to using and *understanding* Heroku's platform, from the ground up.  Regardless
of what programming language or web frameworks you use, if you're serious about
deploying your web applications to the best platform around, and want to master
your tool set, this book is for you.

If you'd like to buy the book (or learn more about it), you can do so here:
[http://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/][a book].

Thanks for reading.

-Randall


[The Heroku Hacker's Guide Cover]: the-heroku-hackers-guide-cover.png "The Heroku Hacker's Guide Cover"
  [a book]: http://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/ "The Heroku Hacker's Guide"
  [Heroku]: http://www.heroku.com/ "Heroku"
  [puppet]: https://www.puppet.com/ "Puppet"
  [Rackspace]: http://www.rackspace.com/ "Rackspace"
  [EC2]: http://aws.amazon.com/ "AWS"
  [best practices]: http://www.12factor.net/ "The 12 Factor App"
  [GitHub account]: https://github.com/heroku "Heroku on GitHub"
  [amazing]: http://kennethreitz.com/ "Kenneth Reitz"
  [people]: http://craigkerstiens.com/ "Craig Kerstiens"
  [foreman]: https://github.com/ddollar/foreman "Foreman"
  [things]: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests "Python Requests"