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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 30 Ratings

good if you're new and growing your first large scale site - 2008-10-04
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Very Technical - Little Fluff Here - 2009-03-24
Reviewer Rating:
Typically when reading a technology book they fall into two categories.
They are over your head or too general. This book probably falls into the first category. I would imagine for the right techie this book would have so many great code examples they would love it. Had I bought this in the store, and not online, the sheer volume of code examples would have scared me away.

Not to worry, this book is great when paired with John Allspaw's "Art of Capacity Planning" John's book is 150 pages while this one is over 300, but they are a dense 300. If you want High Level go with Allspaw if you want Low Level go with Henderson. Also an FYI do not to copy all that code just use the 45 day trial to Safari to get access to the whole book online. This would allow you can download every word in the book, which is very slick.

For me, I did like the comparison in the opening chapter about how a web architect has to remodel a house while people are still living in it. Further along in the book Chapter 9 is worthwhile for the majority of readers even at a high level. Especially the 3 rules for scalability.

A scalable system has three simple characteristics:

They system can accommodate increased usage
The system can accommodate an increased data set
The system is maintainable

Communication is all about knowing your audience, and clearly I wasn't at a technical level for this book, but I still got a few great examples.

Nothing that you cannot find for free on the Web/Blogs - 2009-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
This is the first time I felt compelled to write a review for a book I bought on Amazon. I was hoping for some real interesting and hard-code technical material here. Sadly, after having wasted about $30 on this book I realized that there are many Blogs that discuss distributed caching, scaling, sharding, concurrency and all the really useful bits and you can read it for free.

Not worth it.

nice book - 2008-12-01
Reviewer Rating:
I received this book in three days, which was a fast delivery. I am still working on this book, but I must say I like this book.

This was a great book! - 2008-11-23
Reviewer Rating:
This was a great book! I highly recommend it! Have fun!
[..]
Merry Christmas!!!

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