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Learning To Scale Rails With Crappy Programming Book Covers

By Peter Cooper — April 21st, 2010 — 8 Comments

In Books, Miscellaneous

scaling-rails.pngJason Seifer (of RailsEnvy / Ruby Show fame) and I were recently captivated by a particularly gorgeous technical book cover:

ShowCover.aspx.jpeg

Awesome, right? Eric Hodel (of RDoc and RubyGems fame) thought he had a better candidate for crappiest programming book cover:

atari-forth.jpg

I'm not entirely sold on the Moon being paved with giant keyboard keys while crazy levels of Icelandic ash flash around the Earth at supersonic speeds, but the attire and poses of the characters lended themselves to some mischief.

The result is Learning To Scale ROR by Cooper and Seifer:

scaling-ror.png

Everyone knows the most important part of a book - and the part by which any book should be judged - is its cover, so Jason Seifer didn't waste any time in releasing a PDF of Learning To Scale ROR. You can even read it on Scribd if you can't read PDFs easily.

Consider it a beta edition so far - it's free, so the price is right. Ultimately, the content is secondary to the awesome cover. In a straw poll on Twitter, about half of Rails developers are considering ordering one or two copies based on the cover alone, so don't delay and download your copy today.

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8 Comment Responses to “Learning To Scale Rails With Crappy Programming Book Covers”

  1. #1
    Miles Forrest Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 12:11 am

    I want to buy that book.

  2. #2
    Matt Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 2:13 am

    Wow - that Visual C++ cover is perfect - just like the Win32 API, none of the color elements match or have any sort of logical design, and there's a huge amount of irrelevant garbage that makes it hard to tell what's actually going on. :)

    ROR book cover is teh awsome.

  3. #3
    Matthew Moore Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 2:19 am

    Do they offer in poster size?

  4. #4
    Jits Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 7:05 am

    I will only accept the high gloss hardback edition!

  5. #5
    Cre Says:
    April 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 pm

    Bless teh internets for my ability to view this fantastic book cover.

  6. #6
    Mike Malloy Says:
    April 23rd, 2010 at 5:38 pm

    Nice abs Jason. Can I get the name of your private trainer?

  7. #7
    Kyle Says:
    April 29th, 2010 at 12:53 am

    Is this a joke? It's just that stupid cover, 8 empty pages and a 9th with "The end" on it.

    What gives?

  8. #8
    Zach Holman Says:
    April 29th, 2010 at 6:46 pm

    IT'S A "CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE", KYLE, JEEZ

    I"D LIKE TO ADVENTURE WITH THESE TWO BROS, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

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