REWORK, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of 37signals, the Chicago-based web-application company. He has co-authored all of 37signals’ books, including “Rework,” as well as the ‘minimalist manifesto,’ “Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application.” He also helps maintain the company’s popular blog, Signal vs. Noise, and is regularly invited to speak around the world about entrepreneurship, design, management and software.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on , the open-source web framework optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. He is also a partner at 37signals, a NYT best-selling author, a public speaker, a hobbyist photographer, and a gentleman racer. In 2005, he won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O’Reilly for his work on Rails. He’s co-author of Getting Real (over 40,000 copies sold) and Agile Web Development with Rails (over 100,000 copies sold). He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.