What do you think?
Rate this book
Heroku: Up and Running
Build, deploy, and manage applications in the cloud with Heroku, one of the first PaaS platforms to offer sophisticated hosting and development services. With this book, you’ll learn how to use Heroku’s Cedar runtime stack, a polyglot platform with native support for several languages and frameworks, including Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java, and more.
Learn about how the Heroku platform works and read about day-to-day best practices for hosting your applications on the platform. You’ll learn everything from basic concepts to advanced topics such as Buildpacks so you can start running in the cloud right away.
Learn about how the Heroku platform works and read about day-to-day best practices for hosting your applications on the platform. You’ll learn everything from basic concepts to advanced topics such as Buildpacks so you can start running in the cloud right away.
- GenresProgramming
100 pages, ebook
First published March 22, 2013
5 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 30, 2015
Sufficient introduction, if you're about to start using Heroku.
But the further, the worse. The initial concept & the basics were described in pretty much perfect way, but then book lacks depth - buildpacks' description is very brief, same for deployment and ESPECIALLY stuff related to such core development practices as Continuous Integration. It still doesn't make the book redundant, but with relatively small effort, it could have been much better.
I was missing some RL examples of buildpack restrictions for various types of tech (lang/platform), just to make you aware of the quantity of work you have to put to actually migrate an existing app to Heroku.
Nevertheless, it's most likely still the best introduction to Heroku you can get as a book. It's also quite up-to-date (covers Cedar stack).
But the further, the worse. The initial concept & the basics were described in pretty much perfect way, but then book lacks depth - buildpacks' description is very brief, same for deployment and ESPECIALLY stuff related to such core development practices as Continuous Integration. It still doesn't make the book redundant, but with relatively small effort, it could have been much better.
I was missing some RL examples of buildpack restrictions for various types of tech (lang/platform), just to make you aware of the quantity of work you have to put to actually migrate an existing app to Heroku.
Nevertheless, it's most likely still the best introduction to Heroku you can get as a book. It's also quite up-to-date (covers Cedar stack).
September 26, 2019
Good overview of various features of Heroku along with some discussion of what situations may benefit from these features. Since it is about PaaS offering, it does discuss issues common to cloud-scale/native/ready systems and how it is tackled/supported by Heroku. So, this book serves as a good resource about Heroku and how to use Heroku for cloud ready apps/deployments. However, it does not provide any end-to-end examples, which helps keep the book short at the risk of not catering to all readers.
January 17, 2019
Книга рассказывает о возможностях Heroku и самых общих основах работы с этой платформой. По сути, это не пособие для самостоятельного изучения Heroku, а что-то вроде очень большой рекламы. Цель написания мне не совсем понятна. Сто страниц текста дают тот же эффект, что пару страниц на сайте heroku.com.
November 25, 2015
One of the best first chapters that I've read in any technical book. Perfect catchy intro with a great bird-eye overview of how Heroku works.
Describes perfectly the issues that new Heroku users face when they start using the service. `How Heroku works` is just one of my favourite chapters that I've read. The HTTP routing of Heroku was explained very well! `Understanding Performance and Scale` also keeps it somewhat well going. Mostly only tips and no real example provided, but I can still live with it.
However after the first three chapters things go south. The book loses most of its focus.
Heroku Regions - mostly a throw away chapter.
Heroku PostgreSQL - one of the more obvious examples on how to lose your focus when reading a chapter. The whole chapter felt like a kitchen sink of features put altogether in an attempt to make a logical chapter out of it. While the idea the chapter had is great, the bigger question I ask myself is why?
Probably the most interesting chapter after the Heroku architecture ones - `Buildpacks` was greatly neglected. It starts with, metaphorically, here are Buildpacks, they do stuff, here are some phases with long text. Here you have 4,5 commands in total. That's all. Aaaand authors closing chapter. Wait! Where was my lengthy buildpack chapter? Did I really need the totally pointless `When things go wrong` chapter? And it was very lengthy on top of that. Twitter-driven development, Heroku status site, Heroku support? I think people can think of this before buying a whole book about Heroku.
Overall the book comes far from a real Heroku in-depth. As an Up and Running one I guess it fits the title, but it leaves many people asking for more, including me. It could've been better if some of the more obvious parts as debugging and support were delegated to the actual Heroku support pages and etc. No need to add throw away content in a book, but that's just how I think books should be - pure and focused.
Describes perfectly the issues that new Heroku users face when they start using the service. `How Heroku works` is just one of my favourite chapters that I've read. The HTTP routing of Heroku was explained very well! `Understanding Performance and Scale` also keeps it somewhat well going. Mostly only tips and no real example provided, but I can still live with it.
However after the first three chapters things go south. The book loses most of its focus.
Heroku Regions - mostly a throw away chapter.
Heroku PostgreSQL - one of the more obvious examples on how to lose your focus when reading a chapter. The whole chapter felt like a kitchen sink of features put altogether in an attempt to make a logical chapter out of it. While the idea the chapter had is great, the bigger question I ask myself is why?
Probably the most interesting chapter after the Heroku architecture ones - `Buildpacks` was greatly neglected. It starts with, metaphorically, here are Buildpacks, they do stuff, here are some phases with long text. Here you have 4,5 commands in total. That's all. Aaaand authors closing chapter. Wait! Where was my lengthy buildpack chapter? Did I really need the totally pointless `When things go wrong` chapter? And it was very lengthy on top of that. Twitter-driven development, Heroku status site, Heroku support? I think people can think of this before buying a whole book about Heroku.
Overall the book comes far from a real Heroku in-depth. As an Up and Running one I guess it fits the title, but it leaves many people asking for more, including me. It could've been better if some of the more obvious parts as debugging and support were delegated to the actual Heroku support pages and etc. No need to add throw away content in a book, but that's just how I think books should be - pure and focused.
July 12, 2013
I need to say that I'm new to Heroku platform and that's why I searched for the source which allows me to dig deeper into details. So that was the reason to read the book about Heroku by Neil Middleton and Richard Schneeman.
Well, my feelings about the book are twisted. From the one hand it is the good start for learning what the PaaS is and how to cook it right way. I like that different real life cases are described and the add-on for it is suggested.
On the other hand, yet both authors are a seasoned IT professionals which worked with this platform for a long time and being 12+ year in the same industry myself I expected much more low level details. There are a lot of places which needs to be explained deeper but not wider. I think the book will be better if there will be more references to external sources or more information about DB optimization or different caching strategies and so on. However, I read early release edition so the things might change greatly.
Anyway it's fine book for novice/intermediate level of the reader and a good start for PaaS principles understanding.
Well, my feelings about the book are twisted. From the one hand it is the good start for learning what the PaaS is and how to cook it right way. I like that different real life cases are described and the add-on for it is suggested.
On the other hand, yet both authors are a seasoned IT professionals which worked with this platform for a long time and being 12+ year in the same industry myself I expected much more low level details. There are a lot of places which needs to be explained deeper but not wider. I think the book will be better if there will be more references to external sources or more information about DB optimization or different caching strategies and so on. However, I read early release edition so the things might change greatly.
Anyway it's fine book for novice/intermediate level of the reader and a good start for PaaS principles understanding.
April 5, 2015
A pretty handy look at the Heroku ecosystem, its history and jargon. As someone who's had a modicum of experience with Heroku over the past year or two, and who has a reasonably decent grasp on the basics of relational database administration, most of the text was filling in background rather than introducing entirely new concepts. That said, the chapter on custom buildpacks was really interesting and, I suspect, will one day be a really useful reference. If you've not worked with Heroku and need to worry about deployment processes and production environments with any moderate amount of frequency, this quick hundred-page read (which took me something like a month to actually finish...) is definitely worth it.
December 4, 2013
Very useful overview to Heroku with some useful tips sprinkled along the way. Its a short book but I found myself returning to it as I needed clarification on certain details. It does gloss over certain details but that is part of the mandate of this kind of book.
July 29, 2013
Heroku concepts, deployment, fail over mechanism are explained well. This book would be more user friendly if comprehensive text is shortened with diagrams and concise examples.
January 4, 2014
short introduction into Heroku platform and overview of the main operations & workflow...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews