Building Scalable Web Sites

Given the complexity of addressing 'scalability', Cal Henderson has done an amazing job of producing 348 information packed pages that will keep you glued to the end. This book is a ground up overview of the construction, security, architecture, monitoring, and yes, even scaling processes. Rarely do I find technology books that are cover-to-cover material, but this one had me asking for more, chapter after chapter. Given the scope, some of the sections are brief, but they give you just enough to kick-start your research and fill in the blanks. If you're wondering which tools the big players use, how they scale their databases, how they monitor their servers, or even how they go about their daily life - this book is worth every penny.

Unfortunately, I'm finding that there are still some in the software industry--from "two guys in a garage" to the largest corporation--don't know, follow, or believe software best practices. Suddenly when something goes wrong (e.g. the wrong version of a file was deployed, changes can't be rolled back, the application won't scale), everyone scrambles in an effort to figure out what happened. Oftentimes, if simple software practices were followed, many of these issues would never surface. This book does a tremendous job identifying many of these best practices, identifies how to easily implement them--in almost any situation, and discusses application scaling techniques. As the book mentions, scalability is made up of three characteristics: * The application can accommodate an increase in users * The application can accommodate an increase in data * The application is maintainable Like any good book on application scalability, this one begins discussing the tiered architecture that is common in so many modern applications, and is a fundamental step in creating any truly scalable application. This follows into a discussion on source control--another fundamental part of keeping the application maintainable. The author briefly discusses security issues by touching on cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and the like. The discussion is well written and thorough for the amount of time spent on the topic. Finally, the author discusses many of the issues related to deployment of web applications, including system monitoring and alerting. There is also an excellent section on load balancing, techniques to keep databases scalable, and caching. Finally, the author ties the final section together by showing how to take data from a live production environment and use that information to continually improve the application. This is an excellent read--a must if you are in the business of creating web applications. Whether your applications expect loads of 10 users or a million users, the techniques discussed in this book will make your application perform better and be easier to maintain.

Finally a book that expresses how scalable sites are developed using open source tools like Perl, PHP or Python. And it not only covers the technical aspects of writing scalable sites, but also some of the process elements like source control and revision tracking. This is an excellent book. It's well writtent and treats the reader with respect. It imparts ideas without going through every miniscule detail of implementation. I highly recommend this book.

...it's all there. Maybe it's my background, but I found the first seven chapters to be....dull, and not directly about scalability. To be honest, I almost set the book aside and considered it money NOT well-spent. Then things started to heat up in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 9 it all comes together. That one chapter (9) is the highest density of useful information about website scaling that I've ever seen. There are literally gems on every page. Make no mistake. This book is more of an overview of the landscape, with brief asides that are clearly brain-dumps from his Flickr experience. The author manages to touch on every topic area that matters, and provide simple overviews of the options available and when they should be applied. In that sense it's more like an informal design patterns book (lots of "yeah, I knew that" and "Ah! I had a feeling there was a pattern there" moments), with just enough detail to let me do intelligent googling for deeper insights on analysis, design, and construction of scalable systems. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 make the book worth every penny.