Starting Strength works because it's easy to understand, follow, and see results from. By far the primary challenge newer folks face is establishing the discipline and consistency, and that's a lot easier to do when you're motivated by increasing the weight on the bar regularly.

My favorite quote from the book is from the very first page (which is probably very relevant to the HN crowd):

A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or the spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these people as their squat strength goes up.