Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications

Somewhat written towards PHP, MySQL and Linux users the text manages to cover a good number of topics every web programmer should know about without being too strong on its chosen technology stack. Some chapters are affected more than others, and some of the problems with UTF-8 text are specific to PHP. 90% of the text however manages to be generic that it is not a big problem.

While the book covers none of the aspects of scalability in great depth, since it only really devotes one chapter to it, the book makes up for it by being a check list of things to know and do with any site that is going to get larger. There is certainly more to know about scalability than this book gives you, but many gems of information can be found in it which even experienced developers will find useful. Its not really the definitive reference to scalability but rather the introductory book to all of the non functional aspects that impact how an application is deployed and written, and it covers many topics well and clearly.

Some elements of the book will age quite badly as they refer to particular tools or the speed of a server, but in general it is a clearly written book. It is one of those books you'll go back to and use as the basis of where to start with many aspects of the system.

Very comprenhensive (5/5 people found this helpful)

Cal Henderson's guide to scalable web applications is a book that won't dissapoint you at all.

In the initial chapters, he covers from the very basics ( layered design, good source code control ) to more "complicated" aspects of Unicode, internationalization and localization. He goes on to give a deep-geek analysis of email support in web apps, complete with security problems. Remote services are analysed and thought over as well, and different formats like REST, XML-RPC and SOAP are not forgotten, of course, and they are also duly reviewed twice, pros and cons and all.

Probably chapters 8 and 9 are the most interesting of the book (not to undervalue the rest of the content), as they delve deep into issues and problems that many of us, being way too used to working on the software side of things, tend to disregard when designing application. And that is all hardware issues that pertain to scalable apps. Clusters, Replication, CPU bound bottlenecks, disk reliability, data centers, disaster recovery, spare capacity...all of this is perfectly and clearly explained and very well covered. Very illuminating for anyone working in any non-trivial web development effort, from the developers to the project lead.

Then he tops the book by reviewing, not so deeply, issues with monitoring and statistics (usage, trends) and public API exposure.

The book is geared towards the PHP / MySQL developer working on Linux, therefore all the many tools mentioned are for this kind of environment. However, in spite of working in a Microsoft environment, I found the book very illuminating all the same.

I learned a real lot from it, and I mean to review some chapters every now and then. Is there anything better you can say about a book?

Thanks Cal for this masterpiece.
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Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications

Cal Henderson

Reader Reviews:

Scalability light but wisdom heavy (2/2 people found this helpful)

Very comprenhensive (5/5 people found this helpful)

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