This manual will tell you about the most awesome webserver on the planet: Mongrel2. It is written for people with a sense of humor who want to get things done with Mongrel2. That means, if you’re an operations professional, software developer, hacker or just curious, it’s for you. However, if you’re too serious and think “flowery language” (A.K.A. good, entertaining writing) does not belong in your software manuals, then you should just go read the source code and save everyone a huge headache dealing with you.
In case you haven’t figured it out, this book will be fun and slightly obnoxious. That’s not intended to insult you, but just to keep you interested so that you want to read it.
Usually the people running the web can be divided into three types of people: Steves, Edsgers, and Knuths.
The Steves think that the entire internet should be a wonderful user experience where all pages are crafted with pixel-perfect fonts with high gloss visuals and coated with the most happy happy joy joy of all possible experiences. To them, design is paramount and actual stability isn’t important unless it interferes with design. The Steves of the internet think the Edsgers of internet are destroying the universe with things like “functionality”, “security”, and “stability”. Just like the real Steve Jobs, they would rather everything look fantastic and then use awesome marketing to cover up any technical flaws.
The Edsgers feel that the internet is completely unsafe, and until it is a fully curated and crafted set of academic, peer reviewed papers, it will be a festering pile of dung. To the Edsgers, the world is dangerous and only a truly paranoid attitude toward security and stability will ensure that it becomes safe. They want every single piece of software to reject all reality and be crafted from nothing but pure mathematics, and hate the fact that the Steves want to run around painting the world with useless frivolous colors and words and things that lead to ambiguity and happiness.
The typography in this book, and the entire project, is for the Knuths of the world. I like to think of the Knuths as the practical yet professional types with a light sense of humor. They are the ones who are getting things done while still balancing between great typography and solid bug-free functionality. They aren’t zealots, but practical, straight-forward type of people.
That is why this book is written in TeX, and why it uses whatever fonts TeX uses.