Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Addresses all aspects of growing a web-based service
Comment: From hardware to the LAMP software cache, from performance profiling to SQL query tuning, from source control to database partitioning the author addresses or touches all topics involved in growing a web service (which happens to be my primary occupation these days). The book is well-structured and the balance between each aspect is fairly good. The coding examples are few enough that their emphasis on MySQL and PHP are not a problem even if you don't happen to use these technologies.
Recommended to anyone who want to deliver a web service at a professional level.
Customer Rating:
Summary: OK - book
Comment: I like this book. Very good - easy language. Intresting to read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Way too technical for me.
Comment: I couldn't get through it and had to end up sending it to my team of developers. The title is very compelling, but from a creative/management perspective, it's dense. I wouldn't recommend this book for someone like me who handles every aspect of Web application development except for the actual coding.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Scalable it is...
Comment: Excellent book. Addresses the key aspects of Scalability and answers a lot of the why's. A must read book
Customer Rating:
Summary: I wish all software developers would read this
Comment: 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.
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