Customer Reviews

Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am sharing a small practical example to illustrate the worth of this beautiful book! I recently joined a company which is the leader in web application acceleration and performance management, streaming media services and content delivery. Many of the rules in this collection helped me to grasp the scalability architecture and principles at my new job very quickly, few are listed below:

Rule 4 -- Reduce DNS Lookups
Chapter 6 -- Using Caching Aggressively (several rules)
Rule 16 -- Actively Use Log Files
Rule 29 -- Failing to Design for Rollback Is Designing for Failure

The fact is if you consider yourself a scalability/infrastructure/cloud architect or manager, this book is a must. I have experienced first hand the rule of "Failing to Design for Rollback Is Designing for Failure" ... so I have deep appreciation of the authors great service in codifying the technical-management scalability framework.

I always like books that give me information I can use and make me look smart all at the same time. Scalability Rules is just that kind of book.

It offers clear, understandable and most importantly, implementable solutions to the real problems in building high-traffic web sites. Reading Scalability Rules is like hiring Abbott and Fisher to solve your site performance problems. The book's flow and and coverage sound just like they're talking to you in your conference room about your own website.

Also, I really applaud the book's layout recognizing that different technical team members are looking for different information. For instance, manager's are directed to some chapters while other sections are focused on software developers and technical operations folks.

A great read, technically brilliant and incredibly helpful.

I liked this book so much I read it twice so that I'd get the maximum benefit from its recommendations. The authors clearly have strong real world experience so their recommendations seem highly relevant. I also like the way the book is organized into 50 rules that you can absorb in small chunks. I was also impressed with the quality of the writing - clear, grammatically correct, and very meaty without a lot of fluff or overly technical jargon.

With regard to the specific recommendations in the book, I was very pleased to see "Don't Overengineer the Solution" as Rule 1. In my experience, this is by far the biggest problem in software today and is the biggest cause of not only scalability problems, but performance, maintainability, and extensibility problems as well.

My only small quibble with the book is the lack of a discussion of object relational mapping technologies. As the authors note several times, the database is usually the most difficult component to scale. I think that is absolutely true. Given that fact, I think the database needs to be fully tuned and optimized and this includes the data access code. As other authors have noted (and my own experience confirms), ORM generally performs and scales very poorly. Not to mention it often represents "overengineering". Therefore, I expected at least some discussion of that issue.

With that small criticism aside, I highly recommend this book.

The quality of information in this little book is fantastic, but despite the notion mentioned in the book about being able to read it all on a cross-country flight, no one should do that! Well, you could, but I have more highlighted text and notes written across what little white space there was to suggest this book inspires as well as informs. Next time I read thru it though I will try and follow the suggested chapters since reading them from front to back does give an unorganized feel. I hope for the next printing they break everything down into only a few sections grouped by target audience instead of the choose your own adventure style it has now.

If you are building commercial Internet sites then this is another must-read title from Abbott and Fisher. You can save yourself a whole lot of grief by learning from their experiences - both good and bad. This book doesn't sugar coat the points, but that's just what we need.

For those of us who try to live by these rules on a daily basis, it's amazing to have them codified.

This is an amalgamation of many years of hands on experience at scaling eBay by Marty as well as understanding what successful companies are doing behind the scenes to scale.

Just applying one of these rules successfully can dramatically change the trajectory of how your company scales and how customers interact with your product.

The book covers very important rules on scaling backend systems as well as optimizing your users experience with your site.
Highly recommended and well worth the read.

I was looking for a practical book to give to my IT and marketing teams so that we can generate some buzz around our digital marketing strategy. There is a lot of noise out there when it comes to digital marketing and when dealing with web site effectiveness. I love this book as it is full to tips and techniques and does not require tremendous technical knowledge. This is the second book I bought from these authors and, as a non technical Leader, I enjoy their work and insights. A must have!

This book goes through all scalability terms, but doesn't say nothing but obvious about them. It's also poorly written. It could be a starting point to a very newbie , but also I would not recomend this book for a newbie, it's not easy to read and very unclear in many points.

Good content, but the authors have taken some simple concepts and dazzled them up with doctoral thesis finesse. In this book the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," would be equivalent to, "The nippy Vulpes bounds high above the lethargic Canis lupus familiaris."