Building Scalable Web Sites

by Cal Henderson

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.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computers, Nonfiction, Software, Technical, Web

349 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Barbara Krein]

I am still reading this book. But I can tell that is the most important book for any developer out there. Read it. Watch the videos.

[Gang Lei · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is definitely worth reading, even thouhg not exactly my style. I recommended it to a friend of mine and got back only positive feedback.

[Chris Witt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this book was relevant when it first came out, but going through it in early 2009 I couldn't believe how many inaccuracies were present throughout the book. Completely outdated and misleading information on web services, XML feeds, and the .NET platform.

The book should have just been called "Why I Am In Love With .PHP and MySql And Don't Believe That Any Other Combination Can Be Used To Build A Successful Website".

I found myself shaking my head repeatedly, thinking "Have you ever actually *used* the .NET platform? It totally DOES do exactly what you're saying it can NOT do."

I'm not a defender of .NET. I could honestly care less whether or not somebody uses it. It just that it happens to be what my work place does all its development in right now, and I've been here for 7 years. Been doing .NET for almost one year now, and while I'm still learning my way around it, I have definitely done things that the author claims I can't.

[Prasanth Gangaraju · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book IS outdated, and irrelevant in the current tech scenario. But, it certainly is very good in a way - it teaches the experienced programmer about the necessary foresight one must have while building an application that s/he wishes would scale. Sure there is the famous quote - "Plan to throw one [version] away; you will, anyhow.", but this book helps you to avoid doing that.

[Wish Krispacharawich · Rating 5 out of 5]

highly recommended

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be a great book to give to someone working on their first web service. I wish I had read something like it when I first started.

The author opts for breadth rather than depth, covering unicode, data sanitation, load balancing, database sharding and replication, SQUID proxies, monitoring, email servers, and many other topics. Fortunately, he acknowledges that he's only skimming the surface of many of the areas, and provides ample references to other books or software projects.

The main caveat is that this book is heavily oriented towards the LAMP stack and may be of limited use to those building web services on alternate technology stacks.

[Ben Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cal is not a great writer, but he is a great resource and so if your MO is to design a large website well from the get go Cal will point you on the roads you need to walk down. The book was practical, but obviously couldn't go too deep into any of its topics, layered architectures, unicode, security, email, database scaling, caching, monitoring, and APIs. It came with a decent amount of redundancy and to me some parts were pointing to topics so advanced that I just had to shrug a maybe later. But then that's important, if Alexander had bought a map before he left Macedonia he might not have been so disappointed when he ran out of empires to conquer.

[John Hobbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it is a bit dated, and you could probably scrape all of this together off the web, it's still a good book.

Very little of it has passed into total irrelevance, most of it you can gain some value from.

He's best at describing high level concepts, like sharding.

A good read, even if you are passingly familiar with this stuff, you will gain a deeper understanding.

[Dmitry Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most if the book is outdated and irrelevant, the tools and mechanisms (MYSQL, PHP, XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS) is not
something one would expect to see in a book on scalability in our iaas/paas/automatically sharded nosql/json/single page webapp world,
however it is still a good book and I have enough notes after reading it to justify the time spent.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the different types of considerations you need to be mindful of when building scalable web applications. Breadth valued over depth, but there are whole books on most of the topics covered, so it's worth the read as an introduction to mega-app issues.

[Ala' Abuhijleh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. it covers most of scalable website aspects. Very practical and enriched with examples. however, the flow of ideas is not clear and some topics are prematurely concluded. It also misses to cover important issues related to scalable website e.g. caching engines

[Izidor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Funny time back to 2006. Having the book back in the time, wow man, so much knowledge and experience. Overview of more advanced approaches (replication, web services authentication) can be still useful nowadays.

[Carlos Fenollosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guía muy completa sobre el proceso de creación de un website escalable y exitoso. Desde el modelo MVC hasta trucos para escalar mysql.

Toca todos los niveles de detalle, y aunque sea del 2006 todavía es actual. Muy bien escrito, toca todos los temas importantes.

[Omar Espinosa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Right now this is a very very dated book. I has some historical value, as it helps you to remember how things were done several years ago. One example is that it discusses magnetic spinning disks a lot.

[Daryn Nakhuda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dry (and I love this topic). Good information is contained within, and it's a good read for web engineers.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book from the front lines.

[Tim Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent & approachable guide for scaling websites; Chapter 4 is a bit long & out of place, but rest is high-quality stuff

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some useful tips drawn from experience for scaling a high traffic web application.

[Jeff Jia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cal seems not to be a good writer, and the book is poorly written.

[Presley Acuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good one to add to your bookshelf, if you are a web-techie. Contains useful knowledge, clearly presented.