The year in books #14: Building Scalable Web Sites

For my last book, I took a brief break from the world of fiction, and delved into Building Scalable Web Sites. Written by Cal Henderson, the book delivers precisely what is promised by the title: an introduction to the principles involved in planning and constructing web applications that are capable of scaling to serve massive numbers of users. Henderson is Director of Engineering for Flickr, and the book sports a logo promising that it will deliver things "The Flickr Way", but actual concrete examples of how Flickr is run are rather sparse. Not that that's a bad thing; I came to this book hoping for a generic introduction to scalable web-design, not as a collection of charming war anecdotes, and the "well that's certainly amusing, but why are you telling me this?" factor that's common to many texts is not at all present here.

Obviously, whether I can recommend this book to you depends a lot on whether you intend at some point to design, implement or maintain a scalable web application. As a web-app programmer looking to expand his knowledge of design and architecture paradigms, this was a perfect entry point for me. My only complaint is that the text badly needs the loving attention of a copy editor; it contains enough typos and grammatical errors to be seriously distracting at times, and there were a few places where it was not clear what Henderson was trying to say due to mutually exclusive possible interpretations of a mangled sentence. I read the first edition of the book, though - hopefully future versions will be a bit more reader friendly.