Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications | 
 enlarge | Author: Cal Henderson
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 7630
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 348
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0596102356
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.72
EAN: 9780596102357
ASIN: 0596102356
Publication Date: May 16, 2006
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Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: I20081010021123S
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, "Building Scalable Web Sites" offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use. Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of memory and hard drive space. It requires thinking about how to grow over time, how to make the same resources accessible to audiences with different expectations, and how to have a team of developers work on a site without creating new problems for visitors and for each other. Presenting information to visitors from all over the world * Integrating email with your web applications * Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet * Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions * Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks * Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find "Building Scalable Web Sites" to be a library of ideas for making things work.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
 good if you're new and growing your first large scale site October 4, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has many good sections, including some that actually touch
on the title of "scaling" web sites. However, most of the book
is oriented to a whole set of disjointed topics such as Unicode, MIME
email, and RSS, etc. Well written, but having nothing to do with
scalability.
The chapters that are on topic are generally good, but lacking in depth.
What it's missing is an overview of different techniques for scaling,
as well as different architectural models.
The entire book is fairly PHP centric. I would really have liked to have
seen more about tradeoffs and architectural details of what you should
do if you have Java, Javascript, AJAX, or Perl, or how to deal with
spreading your site over datacenters around the world.
"The Flickr Way" pretty much describes the book, since most of the
material seems to relate to doing things one way.
This book would be excellent if you have a single webserver that has
taken off and you're lost. If you already have a shelf of O'Reilly
books and a background in sysadmin or web development, much of the
material is redundant to other, more in depth manuals.
 Great book on web development, with at least one chapter ALL software developers should read! July 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I first started reading this book I had certain expectations about the technical level of the content. I was expecting to have a lot of information about webservers, and load balancers, an d database clusters, and maybe software architecture.
I was pleasantly surprised as it covers all those things and more.
First as I've done in several of my reviews let me list the chapter titles.
1. Introduction
2. Web Application Architecture
3. Development Environments
4. i18n, l10n, and Unicode
5. Data Integrity and Security
6. Email
7. Remote Services
8. Bottlenecks
9. Scaling Web Applications
10. Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
11. APIs
I would recommend this book to any Web 1.0,2.0,3.0 startup trying to get ready to write their first line of code, well before that even.
Chapter three will be a review to many who read it, assuming they have good software engineering practices. Use revision control, use bug tracking, have a simple and repeatable build. This is really a good chapter which really applies to any kind of software you might write.
A general statement about this book, in numerous places where there are multiple options for tools to use, some free, some which cost real money, the author makes a list of the popular alternatives, gives pros and cons and a ball park for cost.
Chapter four, well if you don't know anything about internationalization (i18n), localization(l10n) and/or unicode, this chapter will resolve that problem. These efforts can introduce complexity into your system, and this chapter and frankly many place later in the book continue to point out the issues which can come up when dealing with not ascii characters.
Well I could write a chapter about each chapter, but then you wouldn't buy the book, which you should if you want to know about the topic.
I may even read it a second time.
Upbeat and Informative June 8, 2008
This is a practitioner's book. Very knowledgeable, very hands-on, systematic in an expert's way, through clearly hard-won experience. Fun and irreverent too. I recommend it highly.
So, what's my beef? It's not with the book. Hercules, Atlas, or Odysseus?
Great resource, tells you what you need to know if you are just starting in this field April 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book introduces the tools, processes, and high level architectures used in building large websites like Flickr, Youtube, etc. It is short enough to give you the high level framework and send you to explore various other books, software tools, etc to get more depth as needed. I found it very valuable.
 useful web developer guide February 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a very useful guide for the professional web developer whose goal is to produce larger database-driven web sites in a scalable, debuggable way. Topics such as how to handle more web requests than a single web or database server can handle are covered thoroughly, in the usual easy-to-follow style that all O'Reilly books seem to possess.
The author has some good experience with scalable web apps, too, having been part of the development team for the Flickr web site. Think about what it must take to receive, store, and display all the pictures that Flickr has to offer nowadays. Many of the chapters contain some behind-the-scenes descriptions of how Flickr handled the given chapter's topic, which is very interesting to read. Web application development, really any large-scale web site development, is not simple - there are a lot of things to consider. This book can help you track the major details you should be thinking about for such a project, predict scalability issues that may arise, and design for maximum scalability and flexibility in the future.
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