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.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Upbeat and Informative
Comment: This is a practitioner's book. Very knowledgeable, very hands-on, systematic in an expert's way, through clearly hard-won experience. Fun and irreverent too. I recommend it highly.

So, what's my beef? It's not with the book. Hercules, Atlas, or Odysseus?

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great resource, tells you what you need to know if you are just starting in this field
Comment: The book introduces the tools, processes, and high level architectures used in building large websites like Flickr, Youtube, etc. It is short enough to give you the high level framework and send you to explore various other books, software tools, etc to get more depth as needed. I found it very valuable.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: useful web developer guide
Comment: This book is a very useful guide for the professional web developer whose goal is to produce larger database-driven web sites in a scalable, debuggable way. Topics such as how to handle more web requests than a single web or database server can handle are covered thoroughly, in the usual easy-to-follow style that all O'Reilly books seem to possess.
The author has some good experience with scalable web apps, too, having been part of the development team for the Flickr web site. Think about what it must take to receive, store, and display all the pictures that Flickr has to offer nowadays. Many of the chapters contain some behind-the-scenes descriptions of how Flickr handled the given chapter's topic, which is very interesting to read. Web application development, really any large-scale web site development, is not simple - there are a lot of things to consider. This book can help you track the major details you should be thinking about for such a project, predict scalability issues that may arise, and design for maximum scalability and flexibility in the future.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book for building durable web applications
Comment: Despite its small page count this book both covers the basics for building a web application (i.e. how to pick a hosting service) and advanced topics such as cutting edge techniques for scaling out. Great as an introduction to building web applications and as a reference.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good indeed
Comment: Very good material, specially in the current world where people think that their out-of-the box Java application servers will do the job of serving tons of pages a day.

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