Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Best to start out on the right foot than to play catch-up later...
Comment: This is a book that grew on me the longer I read it (and no, that's not supposed to be a pun)... Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson. Let me explain...
Contents: Introduction; Web Application Architecture; Development Environments; i18n, L10n, and Unicode; Data Integrity and Security; Email; Remote Services; Bottlenecks; Scaling Web Applications; Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting; APIs; Index
Henderson is the engineering manager at Yahoo in charge of Flickr, so right off you can figure he knows a bit about what it takes to scale a web site. From that perspective, what he says is worth paying attention to. The book (for me) started out a little slow, with information on development environments and architecture, stuff that I've seen covered in other books in far more detail. I was a little fearful that I was going to get high level "best practices" information with nothing much more. But things started to pick up after that... It felt to me that all the information from that point on really focused on how that concept or practice can make or break a site that is pulling down hundreds of thousands (or millions) of hits a day. Things that work great for 1000 hits can be completely broken at 100000. The chapters on bottlenecks and scaling web applications are excellent discussions of how best to *intelligently* handle performance and growth without just throwing money and hardware at the problem. Well worth reading regardless of how big your site is right now.
He tends to assume/target sites that are built using common open-source technologies, like PHP and MySQL. As such, you'll probably get much more out of the details if you are already conversant with those. But still, the general concepts apply across the board, and it's all worth covering. And it's really best to make some of these design decisions up front, rather than down the road once you're playing catch-up with your traffic...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential Book For Optimal Web Design
Comment: 'Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications' by Cal Henderson is a fantastic book for examining the important need of designing a web site that is adaptable for the future. At my current place of employment we have had to deal with the issues/problems addressed in this book for years now, and having a guide like this would have probably only made things easier.
With any web-based company and relating product, there will eventually be a time that comes when the current architecture just no longer does the job. When that time arrives, the process of addressing storage/memory/code problems can be very costly, or it can be dealt with at a much earlier point in time. This book won't do the work for you but it will help point out the problems that can result sooner instead of later.
Chapter Listing
01. Intro
02. Web Application Architecture
03. Development Environments
04. Localization & Unicode
05. Data Integrity & Security
06. Email
07. Remote Services
08. Bottlenecks
09. Scaling Web Applications
10. Statistics, Monitoring, Alerting
11. APIs
Another reviewer is correct in that the gems in this books are chapters 8-10. If you read nothing else in this text, focus on these 3 gems and you will have gotten your money's worth. For any IT individual or engineer that is in charge or the overall design of your web application/site, read this wonderful book and improve the future of your web presence!!!
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Resource, but a bit wordy
Comment: I came to "Building Scalable Web Sites" as our team was expanding, introducing two new developers to the existing pair of us. For that reason alone, I jumped at the opportunity to review this book, and once I realized it was from one of the designers of Flickr, that piqued my interest even more. We'd recently moved from hosting our family albums locally to a Flickr website, and so their background and scalability affected me directly.
The introduction chapter started off quite dry, as the author attempted to introduce "What is a Web Application", a step probably not necessary for this volume's intended audience.
The second chapter opened right up however. Henderson's analogy of a trifle to describe Architecture was genius, with your sponge base all the way to your garnish of sprinkles on top. I went racing into the third chapter, exited about the prospects of Source Control ( a problem with our current environment, and one I only see getting worse).
Unfortunately, the book slowed right back down again, dragging through too long segments on Release Management, Issue Management Strategies, and the like. I took longer and longer breaks to come back to this section, almost leaving the book to the side here.
The book continued in this fashion, some bits of great insight and interest, but scattered with wordy, heavy sections that seemed to strangle the pace. As a Higher Education Programmer, Unicode was completely irrelevant to my projects, but the section on Canonical Holes brought me right back in again.
SQL Injections kept me reading right along, but a whole chapter on email in your web application had me drifting again. In summary, Henderson goes into great detail where you need it in some great areas on Scalability, but I'd not read it straight. Find the chapters that relate to your project or your goal, and you'll find a great resource.
The index is great for this purpose, with well thought out keywords that I've already found myself referencing even though I've just only finished the book. The lean of the volume is pretty heavily LAMP, with several Linux/Unix only references and software leads, which would be great for some audiences, but in our ColdFusion/IIS environment, I found myself searching for a tool that was described in the book only to realize that it didn't support Windows Servers.
It also focused heavily on scaling up to millions of users, and I think many system administrators would be more interested in a quicker, dirtier look at taking their dozens to hundreds of users into the thousands and tens of thousands of users instead. Preparing that heavily for growth at these early stages would slow production much too far, in my opinion.
And enjoy the trifle analogy. Mmm...trifle.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An alternative to the J2EE/.NET world view
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Get this book if you're a developer or engineer considering doing a Web startup
Comment: Though it's nothing like a step-by-step guide (and it doesn't claim to be one), this book appears to be the closest thing available to a nuts and bolts look at managing the technical side of doing a Web-based startup. There's lots of code inside, but the book isn't built around a single, extremely contrived, case study like an online wine store. The chapters follow a general pattern: a topic (like bottlenecks in your application and platform, scaling, or monitoring) is addressed and some rules of thumb that describe the way that the author feels things should be done are set forth and explained, with numerous very specific hints and factoids mixed in along the way.
The table of contents doesn't seem to have been posted here, but you can find it (and a sample chapter, "Data Integrity and Security") by searching for "oreilly catalog scalable web sites" on Google.
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