Product Description

Slow websites infuriate users. Lots of people can visit your web site or use your web application - but you have to be prepared for those visitors, or they won't come back. Your sites need to be built to withstand the problems success creates. "Building Scalable Web Sites" looks at a variety of techniques for creating sites which can keep users cheerful even when there are thousands or millions of them. Flickr.com developer, Cal Henderson, explains how to build sites so that large numbers of visitors can enjoy them. Henderson examines techniques that go beyond sheer speed, exploring how to coordinate developers, support international users, and integrate with other services from email to SOAP to RSS to the APIs exposed by many Ajax-based web applications. This book uncovers the secrets that you need to know for back-end scaling, architecture and failover so your websites can handle countless requests. You'll learn how to take the "poor man's web technologies" - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or other scripting languages - and scale them to compete with established "store bought" enterprise web technologies. Toward the end of the book, you'll discover techniques for keeping web applications running with event monitoring and long-term statistical tracking for capacity planning. If you're about to build your first dynamic website, then "Building Scalable Web Sites" isn't for you. But if you're an advanced developer who's ready to realize the cost and performance benefits of a comprehensive approach to scalable applications, then let your fingers do the walking through this convenient guide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68608 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 330 pages

Review
"What this book gives, possibly uniquely, is both a look at the whole spectrum of building a service and some details of all the major stages. It's ideal to give to someone who has a tight focus or experience on a particular area, e.g. writing lines and lines of PHP code which kills the database or filer because the author has little appreciation of what happens at other levels of the system structure. This book would make an ideal guide to people who need to be given some indications of the world beyond a small area. It's also a good read for those who build web sites which may potentially get a large volume of traffic to learn from flickr and why they made the decisions they made." - Sam Smith, news@UK, September 2006

From the Publisher
This comprehensive guide covers the design of software and hardware systems for web applications. Using scores of examples and leading-edge tips, it details proven methods for scaling web applications to millions of users. Topics include application architecture, development practices, technologies, Unicode and general infrastructure work. Ideal for anyone ready to realize the cost and performance benefits available to web applications today.

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.

Customer Reviews

Very comprenhensive
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.
Buy It!!!

Scalability light but wisdom heavy
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.

Great book
This is a great book. The only bad thing is that you have to know basic php/mysql programming. This is not a manual for building web apps, it's a book to make them big so they don't crash.

4.5/5

Greets