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

By Cal Henderson
May 2006
Pages: 348
ISBN 10: 0-596-10235-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596102357
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Description

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.
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Featured customer reviews

A must read for those in the web space,  July 27 2008
Submitted by Bill D   [Respond | View]

When I first started reading this book I had certain expectations about the technical level of the content. I was expecting to have a lot of information about webservers, and load balancers, an d database clusters, and maybe software architecture.


I was pleasantly surprised as it covers all those things and more.

First as I've done in several of my reviews let me list the chapter titles.

1. Introduction
2. Web Application Architecture
3. Development Environments
4. i18n, l10n, and Unicode
5. Data Integrity and Security
6. Email
7. Remote Services
8. Bottlenecks
9. Scaling Web Applications
10. Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
11. APIs

I would recommend this book to any Web 1.0,2.0,3.0 startup trying to get ready to write their first line of code, well before that even.

Chapter three will be a review to many who read it, assuming they have good software engineering practices. Use revision control, use bug tracking, have a simple and repeatable build. This is really a good chapter which really applies to any kind of software you might write.

A general statement about this book, in numerous places where there are multiple options for tools to use, some free, some which cost real money, the author makes a list of the popular alternatives, gives pros and cons and a ball park for cost.

Chapter four, well if you don't know anything about internationalization (i18n), localization(l10n) and/or unicode, this chapter will resolve that problem. These efforts can introduce complexity into your system, and this chapter and frankly many place later in the book continue to point out the issues which can come up when dealing with not ascii characters.

Well I could write a chapter about each chapter, but then you wouldn't buy the book, which you should if you want to know about the topic.

I may even read it a second time.


Ready, Set… Scale!,  March 24 2008
Submitted by joshSVUG   [Respond | View]

I found the book very informative and for the most part easy to read. The book can be used as a compass for building large scalable LAMP web sites but it shouldn’t be regarded as gospel.

The book is a fine foundation but if you poke around you may find other “best practices”. One example, the section discussing “Mitigating SQL Injection Attacks” one can argue against granting the delete privilege to the application user. If the application user can’t delete, use a logical/soft delete by setting a flag on the records to be deleted… this way you also gain an “undelete” option. To physically purge the data, have a separate user/cron job that does so (segregation of duties).

The one odd thing I found is that it feels as if the book can’t decide if it’s a tutorial (bug tracking/source control) or chronicles of the “Flicker Way” (processing email from mobile devices).

All in all, a book to own.

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Media reviews
"It's not a step-by-step guide (and doesn't claim to be one), but Building Scalable Web Sites is the closest thing available to a nuts-and-bolts look at managing the technical aspects of doing a Web-based startup...most of the chapters follow a general pattern: a topic (like bottlenecks in your application and platform, scaling, or monitoring) is addressed and some rules of thumb that describe the way that the author feels things should be done are set forth and explained, with lots of very specific hints and factoids mixed in along the way."
-- Brian Donovan, Slashdot.org


"...I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who maintains a website, large or small. It may not be a definitive and comprehensive source everything one needs to know for building scalable websites, but it certainly has a good number of practical advice to justify the price."
-- Pankaj Kumar, Pankaj Kumar's Weblog


"All in all, I ended up getting a lot more than I bargained for with this book. I thought I had a pretty good handle on scalability, but this book broadened my scope a bit more to include things which I hadn't considered before - which is really what scalability is about...I'd recommend this book to serious web developers who intend to stay developing over the next five to ten years. In that time, some of this stuff might change, but the principle remains the same: Build to grow = build to last."
-- Taran Rampersad, KnowProSE.com



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• Table of Contents
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• Sample Chapter
• Examples
• Colophon
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"It's not a step-by-step guide (and doesn't claim to be one), but Building Scalable Web Sites is the closest thing available to a nuts-and-bolts look at managing the technical aspects of doing a Web-based startup."
--Brian Donovan, Slashdot.org