Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 348 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. May 16, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596102356
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596102357
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

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 requirements maintenance, you'll find "Building Scalable Web Sites" to be a library of ideas for making things work.

About The Author
Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from England, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc in Sunnyvale, California as the Engineering Manager for the photo-sharing service Flickr. Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

Reader Reviews
When I first starting working on Web application development teams, I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of skills and range of knowledge needed to drive the project through establishing the technical foundations; design, development and testing iterations; to final staged release. Lots of things got discussed in team meetings that I had barely a clue about. Not only do I wish I had this book *then,* I wish all members of my teams could have it *now.* Cal Henderson has a wide background in the area and is lead developer for Flickr, the photo sharing site that has gained deserved popularity and is often mentioned as the quintessential Web 2.0 application. The author does an excellent job of spreading out before you the whole process at a high enough level so the book can be valuable for managers, designers, and all sorts of people involved in putting out the final product. His focus is on program design and design implementation issues, not programming as such. Code is not neglected. Many points regarding design implementation are made with code examples and solutions. I find this book so personally valuable in grounding me in a complex process, I give it the highest Amazon rating even though I found aspects of the book's organization to be completely incomprehensible. This is a book about scalable Web sites and applications but the author does not define scalability nor does he deal with the broad Web issues (like the scaling myth) until 60% into the book! Chapter 9, titled "Scaling Web Applications" should have been much closer to the beginning since it was a high-level view with no code, as the other chapters. I was also befuddled with placing the chapter on internationalization, localization, and Unicode so early in the book -- even before the chapter on data integrity and security. There is nothing like a mind-numbing Unicode glyphs and grapheme discussion to kill the pacing of a book! Skip the chapter entirely or read it last. Organization anomalies aside, the author has a good writing style and he does not view humor as a blunt instrument. His four page analogy between layered architecture and an English trifle was worth the space he took. That's high praise from a guy who does a job that Henderson likens to whipped cream. Comment | | (Report this)