Product Description

Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?

If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.

In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.

Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29002 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

From the Publisher
Everything changes after Release 1.0. The consultants leave;
key developers get reassigned to new projects, and the wild and free
environment of development gets replaced by change review boards and defect
reports. And the public starts beating on the system. Your application
needs to be ready to live in that environment--without you.

Out in the real world, your system may have to endure the huge traffic
spikes of a Slashdot posting, or a sudden influx of international customers
in the middle of the night, or enjoy such popularity that you can't even
take it down for maintenance.

Other books on design and architecture only tell you how to meet functional
requirements. They help your software pass Quality Assurance. But painful
experience has shown that "feature complete" is not even close to
"production ready."

With a combination of case studies and practical advice, Enterprise
Engineering will help you avoid the pitfalls that cost companies hundreds
of thousand--sometimes millions--of dollars.

About the Author
Michael Nygard has been a professional programmer and architect for over 15 years. He has delivered systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. Michael has written numerous articles and editorials, spoken at Comdex, and coauthored one of the earliest Java books. Michael has designed, built, and engineered systems for B2B exchanges, retail commerce sites, travel and leisure sites, an information brokerage, and web applications for the intelligence community. Among other exciting projects in his position as Director of Engineering for Totality Corporation, Michael led the operations team through the launch of a tier 1 retail site. His experience with the birth and infancy of this retail platform gives him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.

Customer Reviews

Daring us to do better
If you are in the business of making software systems, odds are that you might have heard about Nygard's book. People have raved about it since it was published in 2007.

That being the case, it had been on my to-read list for a while, but without any urgency. Then I went a conference where I heard two sessions with Michael Nygard presenting his ideas. After that, I knew I had to get hold of the book straight away.

Release It! is something as rare as a book which is groundbreaking while stating the obvious.

First of all, Nygard makes the simple point that we (meaning the people in the business) are all too focused on making our systems ready to pass QA's tests and not on making ready to go into production. This is hardly news, but it's the dirty little secret of the business. It's not something you're supposed to say out loud. Yet Nygard does that. And not only that, he dares to demand that we do better.

Having committed this heresy, he goes on to explain how we can go around doing that.

He does that in two ways. First he present us for the anti-patterns which will stop us from having a running system in production, and then he present us for the patterns which will make it possible to avoid them. Or, if it's not possible to avoid them, to minimize the damage caused by them.

That's another theme of Nygard's book. The insistence that the system will break, and the focus on implementing ways to do damage control and recovery.

The book is not only aimed at programmers, though they should certainly read it, it's also aimed at anyone else involved in the development, testing, configuration and deployment of the system at a technical level, including people involved in the planning of those tasks.

As people might have figured by now, I think the hype around the book has been highly warranted, and I think that any person involved in the field would do well to read the book.

Real Practical Advice
Easy to read with real world experiences yielding practical guidance for the development of production-ready software.

Highly recommended
The author's wealth of experience is evident as soon as you start reading. He passes on that experience in a very enjoyable and readable way, with lots of real world tips and anecdotes.
I get the impression that no matter what design or deployment problems you face, he's already been there and dealt with them, and has lots of practical advice that can really make a difference.