Paul Dowman

When Building Scalable Web Sites came out earlier this year (written by Cal Henderson of Flickr) I was immediately interested because I’m totally fascinated with the architecture of very large scale systems. But a quick browse through the table of contents changed my mind, it looked really basic and there were only two chapters dedicated to the “scalable” part of the subject. I was interested because the title was “Building Scalable Web Sites”, not just “Building Web Sites”.

But I happened to pick it up in a book store recently and actually flip through it a bit, and it looked interesting so I bought it. I’m glad I did, it was a surprisingly good read. It reminds me a bit of The Pragmatic Programmer: most of the material is fairly basic, but it’s worth reading even for experts because it’s well written, reasonably short, yet quite thorough.

It focuses mainly on PHP and MySQL (on Linux), but really this book is about general principles not implementation details, and those principles are equally applicable to other languages and platforms.

For a list of other technical books that I recommend, take a look at my reading page.