Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications

Reviewed by Dr. Eric Flescher

 

Author: Cal Henderson O'Reilly Released: May 2006 Pages: 348 $30 USD, $39  CND ISBN-10: 0596102356 ISBN-13: 978-0596102357 Intermediate/Advanced   Strengths: Covers many related web topics.   Weaknesses: Hard to  read. Does not deal with the  title and main premise (scalability) immediately. Does not provide a true sense of integration throughout the chapters. If you are not a coder, you are immediately lost.

 

Introduction

 

Sometimes books are not what they appear to b.e   Such is the case of this book. The cover and back information seemed interesting enough. Also since the author works at Yahoo! Inc. and was an engineering manager for the photo-sharing service Flickr seemed to indicate an indicate an interesting book. While those parts of the book were clear, I found that the rest of the book was not, at least for me.

 

I wish the book started with its introduction about scalability in the beginning (it did, but you have to look in Chapter 9 for that chapter).   Perhaps I was confused about the "scalable" part of the title, maybe the title itself. While I have created websites and blogs, I have not used programmable codes much at all. So the book let me down and I felt lost (almost immediately).

 

I don ’t work with with  Java, Javascript, AJAX, or Perl and so I was immediately lost. While the eleven chapters seemed good, there is no sense of integration. They all do not tie together and there seems to be no integration. I had no idea how all these applications and codes actually tied together.  Some chapters seemed initially comfortable but the reading and comfort ability immediately got bogged down due to the complex readings. For example, Chapter 11, API’s, I thought Google Earth and Maps but there was nothing in the chapter about this at all.

 

Conclusion

 

The title and the readings are very misleading. There is little about “scable” techniques, until later in the book. The introduced or first chapter should have launched into this title immediately, clarified and talked about right away, instead of waiting for later chapters. By that the time, I found some of the information, I was completely lost and could not understand any of the prior information, let alone read most of it.  In addition, certain ideas and concepts like RSS, API etc were not what I understood them to be or did not give me a better sense of what I already understood.

 

I just did not like how the information came through in the readings. It was too wordy and non- specific (for me). If you work on computer coding and programming, you will find various aspects of this book useful. However since I am not in that league, it is not really a book for me and my website ambitions.

 

Before you buy this book, look it over carefully. It might be for you, but it definitely did not have the information in the way that would help me build websites now or in the future.