The Twitterverse was abuzz when 37Signals released their Rework book (complete with availability from Amazon.com, and even in the Kindle format). At first I refrained from listening to any hype; but with a quick glance at the back matter, I found myself a button click away from immediate Kindle satisfaction. Topics like "meetings are toxic" and "planning is guessing" hit pretty close to home with my previous job at Travel Tribe... so I clicked the button.

I had actually owned 37Signals' previous book (Getting Real) for some time, but failed to crack open the PDF. With some spare time on my hands this go-round, I started to read through Rework on my PC before wrapping it up on my Kindle.

Rework is a culmination of good, bad and ugly. It's not really a book. It's a collection of inspiring essays with the 37Signals team talking at you. The book is an extremely quick read filled with opinionated business talk, but most of it is well informed and very pragmatic. Many of the tenets are things that I've just been discovering just recently.

Rework goes against the grain because the quality of writing is intentionally poor. It's not that the ideas are unclear. It's that the book wasn't written to be a business book that tops any charts. It's written as if spoken. It's written clearly and directly - straight to the point - and doesn't let business manual fluff (or proper writing style) get in the way.

As a book of axioms, Rework hits a ground rule double. It might not score you any runs initially, but it'll at least advance the runners. It's up to your own hard work to bring them home.

After reading Rework, I decided I liked it enough to finally give Getting Real a try. This was my mistake. As it turns out Rework is just Getting Real minus a few chapters, minus all the quotes, and rewritten so as to speak more directly in its prose. Rework is essentially a "reworked" Getting Real. This was disappointing to find out. I was able to glean a few pearls from the dropped material between the reissue, but for the most part, I was just reading something that had already been out for a while.

Say what you want about 37Signals, but they've been able to build a successful business using their philosophy (which is found in these books). There is certainly a lot of "I wish we did things that way" in these books. Well, 37Signals has done it that way, and they've been very successful with their products, while Ruby on Rails has helped turn them into the golden children of web 2.0 programming. I recommend you forget about Getting Real and instead take an evening to read through Rework. If anything it's a fun look at what a successful small business thinks makes a successful small business philosophy.