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Building Scalable Web Sites
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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
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Paperback, 352 pages
Published
May 23rd 2006
by O'Reilly Media
(first published January 1st 2006)
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Oct 13, 2019
Barbara Krein
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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.

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 Completely outdated and misleading information on web services, XML feeds, and the .NET platform.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 ...more
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 ...more

The book IS outdated, and irrelevant in the current tech scenario.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.
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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. Bu
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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 c ...more
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 c ...more

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. ...more
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. ...more

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.
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.

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