Building Scalable Web Sites
reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Author: Cal Henderson http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2apps/index.html Released: May 16, 2006 Pages: 348 $40 USD, $52 CND, £28.50 GBP, 28,39Û Euro ISBN: 0596102356 Advanced. Strengths: Shows how to use Open Source tool and commercial ones for designing and developing web apps. Weaknesses: None found. |
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Cal Henderson has taken his experiences with Flikr.com and put the practices into published form. It took me quite a while to get through Building Scalable Web Sites, even though the author has an excellent writing style. I got slowed down while going through the chapter on Unicode glyphs and graphemes. That and the code samples and examples spread throughout the book.
What I found valuable to me anyway were the sections discussing statistics, monitoring and alerting. Others may find the treatments on software development enlightening or perhaps application scalability. Also the discussion on data integrity and security (Cross-Site Scripting or XSS) are helpful.
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.
There are 11 chapters covering application architecture, development environments, internationalization and localization, data integrity and security, Email, remote services, bottlenecks, scaling apps, statistics and APIs.
Run the gamut of web technologies and techniques with this book.
