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Cal Henderson
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Building Scalable Web Sites 1st Edition

by Cal Henderson (Author)
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 58 ratings
See all formats and editions
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.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0596102356
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0596102357
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    June 20, 2006
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7 x 0.72 x 9.19 inches
  8. Print length
    349 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from England, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc in San Francisco, California as the Director of Engineering for the photo-sharing service Flickr. Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (June 20, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 349 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596102356
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596102357
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.72 x 9.19 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 58 ratings

About the author

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Cal Henderson

Cal Henderson

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Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job.

Originally from England, Cal is the VP of Engineering for Tiny Speck. Until recently he worked at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He worked on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) until April 2009 (when it was the "Official website of the Internet").

Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

He promises he's working on a second edition of Building Scalable Websites.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
58 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book good conceptually, well-structured, and thorough. They also appreciate the amazing amount of useful information it manages to pack into such a small space. Readers say it's a great resource and provides a good overview of the topics involved. However, some customers feel the book is outdated.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more
ReadabilityInformation valueStaleness
8 customers mention "Readability"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-structured, interesting, and useful. They appreciate the scope and thoroughness of the book. Readers also say it's a great book for novices and provides a coherent and cohesive account distilled from the lessons.

"...Nevertheless, this book is still relevant because it gives a coherent and cohesive account distilled from the lessons learned from designing,..." Read more

"I liked the scope and thoroughness of this book, although I wish it had a little more information about writing web applications for the Windows/IIS/..." Read more

"...While an interesting read and useful, it was mostly about the hardware scaling: servers and network...." Read more

"...The book is well-structured and the balance between each aspect is fairly good...." Read more

5 customers mention "Information value"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book amazing in how much useful information it manages to pack into such a small space. They say it's a great resource and gives a good overview of the topics involved.

"...choice and security, this book is really quite amazing in how much useful information it manages to pack into such a deceptively small book...." Read more

"...It’s a useful book to read before one dives into more detailed books that provide up to date, modern implementation details." Read more

"...In conclusion, I think it's a good overview on the topics involved, but it's not really about building anything, it's about some topics you need to..." Read more

"...I found it very valuable." Read more

4 customers mention "Staleness"0 positive4 negative

Customers find the book outdated.

"The book is rather old, but it is still great for those who want understand the topic from scratch. Recommended" Read more

"The book is getting a little dated, but most of what's in here still makes sense...." Read more

"This is very old version." Read more

"Very outdated..." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Kourakob Aleksey
5.0 out of 5 stars great book for novices
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2013
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The book is rather old, but it is still great for those who want understand the topic from scratch. Recommended
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Beau Lebens
5.0 out of 5 stars Best Advanced Web Apps Book. Ever
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2006
Verified Purchase
This book, written by the lead developer of always-popular and it is quite possibly the best book (from a PHP/MySQL web app developer's perspective) ever written. If all of this knowledge comes direct from Cal Henderson's head then he's clearly a *very* clever guy.

Covering everything from basic MVC concepts, bottle-neck analysis, code profiling and coding style through to network design, protocol choice and security, this book is really quite amazing in how much useful information it manages to pack into such a deceptively small book. I found myself highlighting large portions of entire pages and then realized that there wasn't much point because the whole thing deserved highlighting.

If you're using PHP and MySQL (in particular) to build web-based applications that might one day serve more than a couple people - you should get this book and read it cover to cover.
9 people found this helpful
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User Guy
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, overwhelming stuff
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2009
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The book is getting a little dated, but most of what's in here still makes sense. I actually put it away after reading 50% of it because it keeps making me feel stressed about all the things I haven't done yet with my own web application. There really is a lot of truth to the Getting Real approach of not worrying about scaling before you actually need to.
I would have loved an abbreviated version of this book which might have told me the few things that are really worthwhile to start doing right from the beginning. Now I am mostly overwhelmed and may actually be more likely to ignore every concern listed in this book until just after it's too late.
One person found this helpful
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Ann K.
4.0 out of 5 stars 2006 text is still a worthwhile read
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2018
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For the negative reviewers of this book, I would ask one simple question: did you read on page xi of the Preface, the first sentence of the section that is titled “What This Book Is About”, which says: “This book is primarily about web application design…” This is not intended to be a book that goes into all the details of scaling all the different parts of a web application, for that would be a book primarily about implementation. It’s an overview of then current design considerations (2006), with general and particular discussions about web architecture, toolchains, data integrity and security, remote (or web) services, bottlenecks , the actual scaling challenges, system monitoring, and APIs. Yes, Henderson worked at Flickr at the time, but he moved on to Slack (so he’s a slacker, after all) and is the CTO and designer of their very successful application suite. It’s 2018, and we have open source frameworks, git and CI/CD, TDD, cloud hosting and horizontal scaling solutions aplenty, PAAS, SAAS, and hosted application monitoring suites, just to mention a few of the changes since 2006. And the dev tools are richer than ever. Nevertheless, this book is still relevant because it gives a coherent and cohesive account distilled from the lessons learned from designing, building, and maintaining a large, real-world website. It’s a useful book to read before one dives into more detailed books that provide up to date, modern implementation details.
2 people found this helpful
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Scott Murawski
2.0 out of 5 stars For beginners or clueless managers
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2011
Verified Purchase
The title should be "Overview Of Building Scalable Web Sites".

I give it 2 stars not because it is a bad book but because I was tricked into thinking it was going to be useful as a scalable website builder. What you should do is look at the table of contents and research those topics and not bother reading this book.

The book is more of an overview of the topics you need to consider when building scalable web sites. For example, if you are building a scalable website and the powers that be put someone who knows nothing about web sites in charge of managing you, this really is the perfect book to give to your new manager. Your new manager will get a clue, but your new manager won't know a thing about HOW to build anything, but will know ABOUT what is being built.

The thing that got me is the first 188 pages of the book, just doesn't seem all that useful. On page 1 there is a definition of "What Is a Web Application", I'd estimate a book like this should assume you know what it is (it even suggests you do know what it is), but probably should save space and not even bother writing about it.

Some sections and my summaries:
Layered Software Architecture - could summarize into: DB layer, app code, html, css on top
Layered Technologies - get appropriate book on actual topic such as DB book, and use a template language
Getting from A to B - separate program from markup, use a template system
Hardware Platforms - dedicated, co-located, self hosting, space/power consumption, networking

It took 26 pages to get through all of that. Indeed they are all very important topics (for the web builder and your new manager to know), but as a builder (if you've gone past the first "hello world" website) you should really know that you'll be using a database and writing web app code and using html and css. You should already know that in order to run a website, you'll need to run it on a computer which takes up space and power and needs to be networked. It's good to know that dedicated/colo hosting exists, but no need to write so much about it.

It's almost like a book titled, "Building huge skyscrapers" and then goes on to say you are going to need construction equipment, concrete and steel. You'd hope the person interested in that book has already built houses or commercial buildings and has used construction equipment and concrete and steel already. I'm probably being too harsh here, but that's the jist of it.

My "favorite" chapter is 3, "Development Environments". Use source control, have a good build system, track bugs. Those are very good rules, but to have 19 pages on source control AND 3 of those pages on RCS/CVS, it's like, "Are you kidding me? Isn't this book about building scalable websites?". Nowadays people probably have never even heard of RCS... (the book is a bit dated though).

Chapter 9, Scaling Web Applications has some stuff about load balancing and database replication/master-slave info, but after reading the chapter, you still won't have the first clue of what load balancing system to use or how to setup database replication or clustering... but you'll know that load balancing and database replications exists and know a little about them.

The actual best chapter is chapter 10, Statics, Monitoring and Alerting, there is information there that is useful. For your own sake though, look at the Nagios, Zabbix, etc monitoring packages and that'll get you started in the right direction.

For the reviews which say this book is technical, I couldn't disagree more, if it was actually technical I wouldn't be so annoyed with this book. If it was technical, then you'd know HOW to do something after reading it...

In conclusion, I think it's a good overview on the topics involved, but it's not really about building anything, it's about some topics you need to know that are involved with building a scalable website.
50 people found this helpful
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Silverbox
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, although written for the LAMP stack
Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2007
Verified Purchase
I liked the scope and thoroughness of this book, although I wish it had a little more information about writing web applications for the Windows/IIS/SQL Server/C# approach (WISC?), rather than Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP).

Great chapter about internationalization, by the way. I've never seen a better description of UTF.
7 people found this helpful
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antz
1.0 out of 5 stars Very outdated
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2019
Verified Purchase
I had a technical recruiter suggest reading this book to help getting through technical FANG interviews. My feedback will be that they need to find an updated reading selection. A 13 year old tech book on web developments is just as outdated as you'd expect.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Robin Philip
2.0 out of 5 stars The book and the ideas discussed are a bit outdated ...
Reviewed in India on August 11, 2016
Verified Purchase
The book and the ideas discussed are a bit outdated (it was written in 2006). Especially on the hardware side. The advent of cloud services means the developer can abstract out a lot of hardware scalability concerns. Most important part of scalability is the database scaling. Only one chapter dedicated to it. Also, no discussion on how to design the application backend for scalability. The book is okay for basic practices of web site building.
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Leo
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2014
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Amazing book. It has all the details normal software engineer must know. All those questions are usually asked at job interviews and are useful in the normal live.
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Lou
3.0 out of 5 stars Moyen
Reviewed in France on July 18, 2013
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Beaucoup de banalités sur la gestion de contrôle et autres sujets bateau, l'auteur ne va pas droit au but. Les informations pertinentes tiennent dans une cinquantaine de pages, mais comme toujours chez O'Reilly, il faut faire du volume et donc broder sur des sujets en dehors de ce qui est annoncé.
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Customer since 1997
5.0 out of 5 stars Eines der besten Bücher seit langem
Reviewed in Germany on December 20, 2006
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Eines der besten Bücher, die ich seit langem zum Thema Skalierbarkeit und Web-Sites gelesen habe. Das Buch erklärt eigentlich alles, was man zum Thema "Wie baue ich einen webbasierten Service im Internet auf" wissen muß. Die Beispiele beziehen sich auf PHP und MySQL, sind aber auch übertragbar - auch Ruby on Rails-Programmierer werden von dem Buch etwas haben.

Das Buch vermittelt keine kompletten Neuheiten, aber ich hatte beim Lesen viele interessante Aha-Effekte.

Wer sich nur eine Website für fünf Besucher bauen will, für den ist das Buch uninteressant - aber sobald es in höhere Lastbereiche und damit andere Anforderungen und Skaliarbarkeit geht, da gibt das Buch viele Antworten.

Der Autor ist übrigens Entwickler bei Flickr und bringt viele interessante Praxisbeispiele.
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Richard Krasowski
5.0 out of 5 stars Hammer Buch
Reviewed in Germany on February 21, 2018
Verified Purchase
Wahnsinns Buch. Es beschreibt sehr viele Aspekte, die beim Erstellen von flexiblen, verteilten hoch skallierbaren Anwendungen zählen. Auch wenn nicht ganz zeitgemäß, so ist es als Einstiegslektüre bzw. zur Übersichtsgewinnung sehr geeignet.
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