As a developer, you are aware of the increasing concern amongst developers and site architects that websites be able to handle the vast number of visitors that flood the Internet on a daily basis. Scalable Internet Architecture addresses these concerns by teaching you both good and bad design methodologies for building new sites and how to scale existing websites to robust, high-availability websites. Primarily example-based, the book discusses major topics in web architectural design, presenting existing solutions and how they work. Technology budget tight? This book will work for you, too, as it introduces new and innovative concepts to solving traditionally expensive problems without a large technology budget. Using open source and proprietary examples, you will be engaged in best practice design methodologies for building new sites, as well as appropriately scaling both growing and shrinking sites. Website development help has arrived in the form of Scalable Internet Architecture.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Total Waste of time
Comment: This book is full of rambling thoughts with no cohesive structure. And the material is not useful. The one takeway from the book is that asynchronous systems scale much better than synchronous systems, and the Spread toolkit can help with this in many situations. Avoid this and get the Cal Henderson book "Building Scalable Web Sites".

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice book, easy reading
Comment: This book is great, you can read it in different order depending in the term you are interested, it is easy for the lecture, it recommends you some best practices and also it questions the way the things are done and why somethings are good for a specific case and not the best for others.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: I could not put this book down
Comment: I picked up this book the other day on the recommendation of a friend, and I can't put it down. I like it because:

* its small (the number of pages 225, the print, the format, the thickness) , but its pithy. Every page has useful stuff.
* the real world experience (pain!) just oozes out of this book. So many times while reading I thought: "Oh yes ... hadn't thought of that."
* its not stridently opensource, nonetheless ends up most there anyway - but only after addressing commercial products and their role
* its business focused, not geek focused - while still being incredibly geeky

Most of all its just really well written and edited. I've caught a couple of minor typos, but nothing that interfered with reading or enjoying the book.

In a world of many great technical books, and insufficient time to read them, its hard to know which ones are worth the effort. This one definitely is.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Gift
Comment: I got this for my son as a gift...he loves it and as usual Amazon comes through with the best service!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Unique and realistic perspective on Scalability and HA
Comment: This is the type of technical book that comes alone all to infrequently. Instead of giving "cookbook" recipes that are inapplicable to the majority of real-world environment, this book discusses how to apply techniques (not recipes) to increase the flexibility (and hence scalability) of your infrastructure. This author obviously has in-depth knowledge of real-work production environments and the unnecessary risks that companies expose their infrastructures to. For example, from my own experience it is pitiful how rampant the concept of HA is confused with load balancing! I have seen CIOs of Fortune 500 companies tout their "risk-free" scalable environment implemented with load balancing. When I explain to them that HA has nothing to do with load balancing, and to insure a high availability infrastructure they need to revamp their architecture, they look at me suspiciously as if I'm trying to squeeze money out of them. When I ask to speak to the Director of Operations and pointedly ask how HA is implemented, and get a response alone the lines of "we have redundant load balancers fronting redundant servers" I know I'm dealing with yet another instance of a gross misunderstanding of HA. When I point out the multiple single points of failure, I'm treated as an adversary intent on discrediting the technical staff! This book reveals the fallacy of such an approach.

The author also discusses elements of a robust HA environment that others book only touch on if not completely ignore. For example, revision control and business continuity among other often overlooked processes. All in all an interesting read that will open your eyes to what is truly a misunderstood topic.

The books handling of scalability, including a discussion of "scaling-down" (or scaling back), is first rate as well.

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