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 31 Ratings

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.

covers a lot of important things, just left out building web sites - 2010-01-13
Reviewer Rating:
this book covers topics like version control software and network architecture, but it leaves out the actual building part. I was hoping this book would cover some examples of software architecture and how/why it's scalable.

Although this book touches on the mvc methodology, there is no connections made to how it makes an application scalable.

I feel a little cheated to be honest

Good, overwhelming stuff - 2009-11-30
Reviewer Rating:
The book is getting a little dated, but most of what's in here still makes sense. I actually put it away after reading 50% of it because it keeps making me feel stressed about all the things I haven't done yet with my own web application. There really is a lot of truth to the Getting Real approach of not worrying about scaling before you actually need to.
I would have loved an abbreviated version of this book which might have told me the few things that are really worthwhile to start doing right from the beginning. Now I am mostly overwhelmed and may actually be more likely to ignore every concern listed in this book until just after it's too late.

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!!!

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Graphics
Internet/Online
Programming

Sub-Categories:
Graphics > Web Graphics
Internet/Online > DHTML
Internet/Online > Web Design
Programming > Ajax