Also know by myself as The Bible. Its new version, Rework, has been by the bed since it was released. Really inspiring book even if you don't agree with everything, it shows you a different view of lots of interesting topics in an easy to read way. Highly recommended.
I've started reading it yesterday on my kindle (which made it really much easier to read), and I'm almost through it. It's two-three hours long, and it's a good read (it feels like short blog posts aggregated in a book). Is Getting Real that much different from it? I can't find it in epub format, sadly...
They used PHP in several places, mostly presentational pages, where the only thing needed were some "includes". Most of these today are replaced by brochure [1], but the legacy remains.
At the time this book was written, 37Signals couldn't keep a Rails stack running for more than a few hours yet, according to that old rant by Zed Shaw.
That does not make his statement false. It said they were restarting servers all day to keep it running. Maybe they didn't feel the need to add their book to that maintenance mess.
There's no reason to try to cover up the fragility of the early Rails web stack. That's in the past. It's much more stable today, with many more choices of software at all layers, than it was in 2006.
I think it's far-fatched to suggest that the "maintenance mess" of hosting static content with Rails alongside what were then the most demanding Rails apps deployed anywhere caused them to look to PHP. I also think you're being pointlessly snarky.
