Book Review: Building Scalable Web Sites
A short while back the book Building Scalable Web Sites came out on Safari. The book is written by Cal Henderson, one of the main people behind Flickr. As I’m currently involved in building a Web application (local.ch) I was interested to learn a few lessons by the Flickr people. Okay, Flickr is not beating any speed records right now, but it’s still an incredibly big application with tons of users and data. Management review: the book is worth a read. Technical short review: the book covers a lot of stuff a bit and nothing extremely well. The book does not completely live up to it’s title as scaling is only part of the book. It seems more to be a list of lessons learned while building Flickr. That’s also the reason for one of the book’s main deficiencies: it’s mostly PHP and MySQL only. But it also includes enough lessons that can be applied in other environments for it to be useful. A short chapter by chapter review follows. ...