
The Heroku Hacker's Guide - googletron
http://rdegges.com/my-heroku-book-is-finished
======
patio11
I respect the "If you don't have enough money for this, I will give it to you
for free" notion. However, given that that policy should _totally resolve_ all
of your moral qualms about charging proper prices, this should probably cost
$25 ~ $50, which will a) compensate the author better, b) underwrite more
giveaways (either of this book or of other projects), and c) ensure that among
purchasers of the book it gets treated as a valuable resource rather than as a
disposable impulse-buy. (You can add to this the somewhat shocking observation
that you _may actually sell more copies_.)

~~~
rdegges
I completely understand this, and believe it to be true.

My motivation for writing the book was primarily to get the information out
there. I really love the Heroku platform, and would like to spread the
knowledge around as much as possible. Charging for this book was really a way
for me to recover a tiny amount of my time back, I have no intentions of
really turning a profit from this.

After some feedback I set the pricing to be variable (5$+), and I've been
giving away free copies to anyone who asked.

So far, the project has been a success (in my mind): over 600 copies
distributed total, which means a large amount of users get to (hopefully) make
use of the information :)

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stevencorona
Hey author! Charge more! $5 is seriously undervaluing your product.

P.S I bought it. It's 61 pages of great material. Go give this guy some money.

~~~
ckrailo
I got the ebook and print book based off the reviews in here. I'm pretty
excited to give this a read tonight. :)

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allwein
So I hopped on over here (after I bought the book) to make this one comment,
the price is too low!

Seriously, the amount of value I've already gotten out of this book today well
exceeds the $5 buy-in.

I'm not saying to raise it straight to the "typical" $27 e-book level, but I
wouldn't have thought twice paying $12 for this. In fact, at $5, you're doing
yourself a disservice and signaling a lack of quality.

~~~
rdegges
Hey thanks for the comment! I'm the author.

I'm extremely flattered by your comment. I didn't really think about pricing
it any higher than 5$. Will definitely reconsider.

Really appreciate the feedback.

~~~
malandrew
To add another datapoint, $10-15 is typically fair in my book. Basically for
unknown content, the price of a decent lunch or a cheap dinner seems
reasonable.

The key to getting a higher price is to "derisk" the investment for people.
Demonstrate value with table of content, links to previous blog posts maybe a
free chapter of intermediate level (not to basic to make the book seem
trivial, but not so advanced as to not be understandable and useful without
context).

Books with code in a github repo are worth more to me. The most valuable are
those that go as far as to create an immersive environment for learning and
experimenting with the concepts. Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent Javascript book
is one of the few that has achieved this with the console/repl that
accompanies the book and is integrated with the example code in the text.

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ActVen
Is there any type of preview or table of contents available? It would be nice
to get a better feel for the contents and style of the book.

~~~
rdegges
Hi there, I'm the book's author. I don't have any preview available, but
here's the table of contents:

Preface

\- Why Heroku?

\- Simplicity

\- Age

\- Popularity

\- Polyglot

\- Solid

\- Best Practices

Getting Started with Heroku

\- Create an Account

\- Install the Toolbelt

\- Install heroku-accounts

\- Project Prerequisites

\- Create an Application

\- Follow the Required Quickstart Guide

\- Push Your Code

\- Check it Out

Dynosaurs

\- What Are Dynos?

\- Understanding Dynos

\- Dynos Run Services

\- One Procfile to Rule Them All

\- Testing Your Procfile

\- Scaling Up and Scaling Down Dynos

\- Handling Failure

\- Calculating Dyno Costs

The Environment

\- Best Practices and You

\- The Config Command

\- Benefits

Take the Pain Away (with Addons)

\- What are Addons?

\- How do Addons Work?

\- The Addon Catalogue

\- Adding, Removing, Upgrading, and Downgrading Addons

\- Addon Cost

PostgreSQL Patterns

\- Why Heroku PostgreSQL?

\- Bootstrapping a Database

\- Connecting to Your Database

\- Destroying a Database

\- Creating Read Slaves

\- Creating a Duplicate Database

\- Promoting a Slave Database to a Master Database

\- View Slow Queries

\- Backing Up Your Database

\- Downloading Your Backups

\- Restoring From a Backup

\- Final Thoughts

Caching with Memcached

\- Why Cache?

\- Using Memcached

\- Memcached on Heroku

Scheduling Tasks with Cron

\- The Scheduler

\- Debugging

\- Cost

Logging

\- Log Types

\- Viewing Logs

\- Viewing Select Logs

\- When to Check Your Logs

\- Log Storage Options

Monitoring with New Relic

\- Why New Relic?

\- Installing New Relic

\- The Overview

\- A Visual Map of Your Application

\- Web Transactions

\- Database Monitoring

\- External Services

\- Dyno Monitoring

\- Background Tasks

\- Final Thoughts

Talking to the World

\- Using Custom Domains

\- Updating Your DNS

\- Encrypt All the Things! (with SSL)

Managing Releases

\- Heroku’s Model

\- Viewing Your Releases

\- Rolling Back

\- Final Thoughts

Working with Others

\- Who is the Application Owner?

\- Sharing Access

\- Sharing Permissions

\- Managing Collaborators

\- Transferring Ownership

Do Great Things

\- Build Services, Not Apps

\- Building Service Oriented Applications

\- Heroku and Services

\- Be Dynamic

\- Final Thoughts

References and Further Reading

Special Thanks

~~~
federicoweber
A sample chapter would be great. Lacking it I've just bought it for $5. I will
buy it again after reading if I liked it.

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pydanny
The author got me started on Heroku at a Hackathon. He knows his stuff and is
good at answering questions. Glad to see him published!

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Zaheer
Heroku has really been amazing for me. As a college student its free and very
cheap upgrade plans make it extremely easy to deploy web apps. It's helped my
learning process and allowed me to release stuff I don't think I ever would
just because of its ease of use.

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rodly
I couldn't buy the book earlier so I emailed the creator and he generously
gave me the book for free (DRM free to boot!). I took a quick look through it
before my last class and so far am loving it (yummm free quality content!).
Thanks again Randall!

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bobbynorton
Gumroad was down, so rdegges emailed a preview to me. After a quick skim of
the preview, I checked and gumroad was back. The book is definitely worth at
least $1 / chapter to me, so I contributed $15. I'm looking forward to digging
in.

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alexshye
After buying the ebook and taking a browse, I agree with the others. As a
first-time web developer who has been using Heroku for a few months, I would
gladly pay more than $5 for this now (and even more a few months ago).

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sjaakkkkk
Skimmed it through -- very, very useful for me! Will be using it to deploy my
first real Heroku project this week. Author was also very responsive via
email. For 5$ it's a no-brainer if you want to start using Heroku.

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tom
$9 isn't the new black, variable pricing is. Happy to spend (and write off)
more to learn some new stuff and support projects like this. I'd love to see a
blog post about the pricing in a few weeks / months.

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davepeck
Just bought it -- thanks for all the hard work. I'm a long-time and high-scale
App Engine user and now have a couple small but growing projects running on
Heroku. I like a lot of what I see!

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pc86
Is this book appropriate for someone who has never used Heroku before or is it
geared toward folks who have beginner-level experience with it?

~~~
rdegges
Both (I'm the author). It covers Heroku from the ground up. I've had people of
many different skill levels review the book, and so far its had extremely
positive feedback.

If you're on the fence, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll give you
a copy for free :)

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instakill
Been following you on Twitter. Raise your price to cover that one-time use
suit! But seriously, the book is well worth more than a fiver.

~~~
rdegges
Just updated the gumroad payment page so it now allows users to pay more than
5$ if they want to. :)

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omilu
anybody else buy this and can't download it? hnews flood brings another server
to it's knees.

it's cool that the part that takes your payment information works great, but
the part that allows you to download what you paid for no worky. urge to kill
rising...

UPDATE!! the author is a cool cat and sent me a copy via email like 30seconds
after i let him know i was having problems. HAPPY CUSTOMER!!

~~~
rdegges
Hey there, I'm using Gumroad to accept payment / etc. If for some reason you
can't download the book, let me know and I'll email you a copy personally.

Sorry for the issues!

You can also email me if you prefer: rdegges@gmail.com

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malandrew
Can you add a table of contents with brief chapter descriptions? It's not
clear what the breadth and depth of the content is.

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fernandosure
I've gladly paid twice the price of the book based on the reviews here. Can't
wait to read it, keep it up with the good work.

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soapdog
Tried three different credit cards. Two visas and one Mastercard. It says it
can't verify my cards. Anyone seeing that?

~~~
rdegges
Hey, sorry about the issues. Not sure if it is gumroad or what. I'll be happy
to send you a copy of the ebook if you'd like, just send me an email:
rdegges@gmail.com

~~~
soapdog
Thanks for replying. Sent you an email! The book looks really good!

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jonpaul
Cool, I picked up a copy! What technology did you use to write the book in?
AsciiDoc, Markdown?

~~~
rdegges
Wrote the book using Sphinx. If I had to do it over again, I'd likely use
Markdown + custom tools. I'm actually planning to write a blog post about this
next week some time :)

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mjbellantoni
Anyone else having trouble getting the payment screen to work?

~~~
superic
I was but was also able to check out anyway. I emailed a screenshot to
gumroad's support address.

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iambatman
is there a kindle version of the book or just pdf?

~~~
rdegges
Right now there's just a PDF, but I'm working on getting it into the kindle
store. If you'd like a PDF before the Kindle copy comes out, send me an email
(rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll send you a free one to hold you over :)

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dirkdk
looks pretty decent!

Question, is the $15 price difference between the pdf and paperback the money
the publisher is charging you?

on my way of buying the pdf right now

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alopes
A+++ Would read again.

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methoddk
Can't wait to read it!

