This book has many good sections, including some that actually touch
on the title of "scaling" web sites. However, most of the book
is oriented to a whole set of disjointed topics such as Unicode, MIME
email, and RSS, etc. Well written, but having nothing to do with
scalability.

The chapters that are on topic are generally good, but lacking in depth.
What it's missing is an overview of different techniques for scaling,
as well as different architectural models.

The entire book is fairly PHP centric. I would really have liked to have
seen more about tradeoffs and architectural details of what you should
do if you have Java, Javascript, AJAX, or Perl, or how to deal with
spreading your site over datacenters around the world.

"The Flickr Way" pretty much describes the book, since most of the
material seems to relate to doing things one way.

This book would be excellent if you have a single webserver that has
taken off and you're lost. If you already have a shelf of O'Reilly
books and a background in sysadmin or web development, much of the
material is redundant to other, more in depth manuals.

When I first started reading this book I had certain expectations about the technical level of the content. I was expecting to have a lot of information about webservers, and load balancers, an d database clusters, and maybe software architecture.


I was pleasantly surprised as it covers all those things and more.

First as I've done in several of my reviews let me list the chapter titles.

1. Introduction
2. Web Application Architecture
3. Development Environments
4. i18n, l10n, and Unicode
5. Data Integrity and Security
6. Email
7. Remote Services
8. Bottlenecks
9. Scaling Web Applications
10. Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
11. APIs

I would recommend this book to any Web 1.0,2.0,3.0 startup trying to get ready to write their first line of code, well before that even.

Chapter three will be a review to many who read it, assuming they have good software engineering practices. Use revision control, use bug tracking, have a simple and repeatable build. This is really a good chapter which really applies to any kind of software you might write.

A general statement about this book, in numerous places where there are multiple options for tools to use, some free, some which cost real money, the author makes a list of the popular alternatives, gives pros and cons and a ball park for cost.

Chapter four, well if you don't know anything about internationalization (i18n), localization(l10n) and/or unicode, this chapter will resolve that problem. These efforts can introduce complexity into your system, and this chapter and frankly many place later in the book continue to point out the issues which can come up when dealing with not ascii characters.

Well I could write a chapter about each chapter, but then you wouldn't buy the book, which you should if you want to know about the topic.

I may even read it a second time.

This is a practitioner's book. Very knowledgeable, very hands-on, systematic in an expert's way, through clearly hard-won experience. Fun and irreverent too. I recommend it highly.

So, what's my beef? It's not with the book. Hercules, Atlas, or Odysseus?

The book introduces the tools, processes, and high level architectures used in building large websites like Flickr, Youtube, etc. It is short enough to give you the high level framework and send you to explore various other books, software tools, etc to get more depth as needed. I found it very valuable.

This book is a very useful guide for the professional web developer whose goal is to produce larger database-driven web sites in a scalable, debuggable way. Topics such as how to handle more web requests than a single web or database server can handle are covered thoroughly, in the usual easy-to-follow style that all O'Reilly books seem to possess.
The author has some good experience with scalable web apps, too, having been part of the development team for the Flickr web site. Think about what it must take to receive, store, and display all the pictures that Flickr has to offer nowadays. Many of the chapters contain some behind-the-scenes descriptions of how Flickr handled the given chapter's topic, which is very interesting to read. Web application development, really any large-scale web site development, is not simple - there are a lot of things to consider. This book can help you track the major details you should be thinking about for such a project, predict scalability issues that may arise, and design for maximum scalability and flexibility in the future.