Building Scalable Web Sites - O'Reilly's Latest Release

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or an interview with
the author, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7094 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

Learn to Build, Scale, and Optimize Web Apps the Flickr Way
With O'Reilly's New Guide to "Building Scalable Web Sites"

Sebastopol, CA--The largest and most popular web applications of the
moment, such as Flickr, Friendster, MySpace, and Wikipedia, handle
billions of database queries per day, have huge datasets, and run on
massive hardware platforms made of commodity hardware. While Google might
be the poster child of huge applications, these other smaller (although
still huge) applications are becoming role models for the next generation
of applications, now labeled Web 2.0. With increased read/write
interactivity, network effects, and open APIs, this generation of web
application development promises to be quite interesting. But system
architects and programmers need help to design and build web applications
that will cope with the demands of this new era.

"Building Scalable Web Sites" (Henderson, O'Reilly, US $39.99) can provide
that help. Readers will learn the tricks of the trade so they can build
and design applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced
headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise
application servers and proprietary programming and database products.
Culled from the experience of Flickr's lead developer Cal Henderson,
"Building Scalable Web Sites" offers techniques for creating fast sites
that visitors will find a pleasure to use.

As Henderson says "With the reemergence of web applications as viable
businesses, the take up of Ajax, and the increased demand from users to
have massive real-time systems with lots of data, more and more people are
building large systems. Maybe they're starting out small, but before long
they're going to encounter a lot of the same problems and limitations that
we've seen time and again.

"Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of
memory and hard drive space," Henderson adds. "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."

Henderson observes that there are plenty of theory and reference books
about building web applications but very little literature about the
practicalities of building and maintaining anything large.  In his
experience, however, companies that built applications on a large scale
all faced the same problems and eventually arrived at the same conclusions
and solutions. "It would appear that we've probably found quite sensible
solutions," he says. "This book is an attempt to collect together a lot of
the ideas that have come out through trial and error. We've already made a
lot of the mistakes, so why force everyone else to make them again?"
"Building Scalable Web Sites" provides helpful ideas for the following,
and much more:

-Designing the software architecture underneath your application
-Choosing and running a software development environment that will keep
programmers, designers, and visitors happy
-Keeping the data on which your application runs clean and secure
-Presenting information to visitors from all over the world
-Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and
simultaneous transactions
-Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to
increase your site's reach and capabilities

"I'm a realist and a pragmatist," Henderson admits. "While theory and
text-book procedures are useful, they are frequently impractical,
especially on the leading or bleeding edges of technology. Theoretical
knowledge is no substitute for practical experience, and every topic in
the book is based on my real-world experience with Flickr and other large
web applications."

Whether readers are planning a small site with hopes of growing big, or
already have a large system that needs maintenance, they'll find a library
of ideas for making things work in "Building Scalable Web Sites."

Additional Resources:

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bio, and samples, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2apps/

For a cover graphic in JPEG format, go to:
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/0596102...

Building Scalable Web Sites
Cal Henderson
ISBN: 0-596-10235-6, 330 pages, $39.99 US, $51.99 CA
order@oreilly.com
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