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By Cal Henderson
First Edition
May 2006
Pages: 348
ISBN 10: 0-596-10235-6 |
ISBN 13: 9780596102357
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
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.
Full 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 needs maintenance, you'll find Building Scalable Web Sites to be a library of ideas for making things work.
Post-purchase benefits:
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 needs maintenance, you'll find Building Scalable Web Sites to be a library of ideas for making things work.
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Book details
First Edition: May 2006
ISBN: 0-596-10235-6
Pages: 348
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 1 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
Ready, Set… Scale!, March 24 2008
Rating:
Submitted by
joshSVUG
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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.
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
"This book is instructive, entertaining, and intellectually enriching. Cal has a lot of knowledge in building scalable websites, and there'll be no mistaking that when you pick up the book. This fellow speaks from personal experience. Do yourself a favor, and don't build a hamstrung site. Read this book first!"
-- Raoul Pop, Blogcritics.org
"What this book will do is to set you straight: what is scalability, and how it’s done, from scratch to finished product, from hardware planning to software planning. It’s all laid out, and it’s easy to understand. Oh heck, Cal even explains what a web application is. And he’ll shatter a few myths, such as this: scalability and performance aren’t the same thing. And, PHP can be used in scalable applications. "
-- Raoul Pop, Come Across
"The chapters on bottlenecks and scaling web applications are excellent discussions of how best to intelligently handle performance and growth without just throwing money and hardware at the problem. Well worth reading regardless of how big your site is right now. "
-- Thomas "Duffbert" Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings
"This is an excellent read - a must if you are in the business of creating web applications. Whether your applications expect loads of 10 users or a million users, the techniques discussed in this book will make your application perform better and be easier to maintain."
-- Mike George, Amazon.com
"Every website can be improved and if it is to grow and flourish, knowledge on how it can be scaled is invaluable. Knowing which tools are available and which ones work well are also very helpful...Run the gamut of web technologies and techniques with this book."
-- Robert Pritchett, MacCompanion
"An excellent book for any intermediate to advanced web developer regardless of the languages that you are developing in."
-- Stephen Chapman, Fellgall.com
"...covers a lot of material in its 300-odd pages, from working with APIs, to optimizing your MySQL code...it's also full of a lot of practical advice in place of theory."
-- Zoltan Hunt, YYZTech.com
