Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications. Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, Building Scalable Web Sites offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use.

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

Presenting information to visitors from all over the world
* Integrating email with your web applications
* Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet
* Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions
* Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks
* Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities

Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find Building

As users come to depend on MySQL, they find that they have to deal with issues of reliability, scalability, and performance--issues that are not well documented but are critical to a smoothly functioning site. This book is an insider's guide to these little understood topics. Author Jeremy Zawodny has managed large numbers of MySQL servers for mission-critical work at Yahoo!, maintained years of contacts with the MySQL AB team, and presents regularly at conferences. Jeremy and Derek have spent months experimenting, interviewing major users of MySQL, talking to MySQL AB, benchmarking, and writing some of their own tools in order to produce the information in this book. In High Performance MySQL you will learn about MySQL indexing and optimization in depth so you can make better use of these key features. You will learn practical replication, backup, and load-balancing strategies with information that goes beyond available tools to discuss their effects in real-life environments. And you'll learn the supporting techniques you need to carry out these tasks, including advanced configuration, benchmarking, and investigating logs.

Topics include:
* A review of configuration and setup options
* Storage engines and table types
* Benchmarking
* Indexes
* Query Optimization
* Application Design
* Server Performance
* Replication
* Load-balancing
* Backup and Recovery
* Security

As a developer, you are aware of the increasing concern amongst developers and site architects that websites be able to handle the vast number of visitors that flood the Internet on a daily basis. Scalable Internet Architecture addresses these concerns by teaching you both good and bad design methodologies for building new sites and how to scale existing websites to robust, high-availability websites. Primarily example-based, the book discusses major topics in web architectural design, presenting existing solutions and how they work. Technology budget tight? This book will work for you, too, as it introduces new and innovative concepts to solving traditionally expensive problems without a large technology budget. Using open source and proprietary examples, you will be engaged in best practice design methodologies for building new sites, as well as appropriately scaling both growing and shrinking sites. Website development help has arrived in the form of Scalable Internet Architecture.

Update 2: Velocity 09: John Allspaw, 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr. Insightful talk. Some highlights: Change is good if you can build tools and culture to lower the risk of change. Operations and developers need to become of one mind and respect each other. An automated infrastructure is the one tool you need most. Common source control. One step build. One step deploy. Don't be a pussy, deploy. Always ship trunk. Feature flags - don't branch code, make features runtime configurable in code. Dark launch - release data paths early without UI component. Shared metrics. Adaptive feedback to prioritize important features. IRC for communication for human context. Best solutions occur when dev and op work together and trust each other. Trust is earned by helping each other solve their problems. Look at what new features imply for operations, what can go wrong, and how to recover. Provide knobs and levers to help operations. Devs should have access to production machines. Fire drills to train. No finger pointing - fix stuff first. Design like you'll get woken up first when there's a problem. Say you're sorry. Not easy - like any relationship.
Update: Operational Efficiency Hacks Web20 Expo2009 by John Allspaw. 131 picture perfect slides on operations porn. If you're interested in that kind of thing.

Dream with me a little bit. Your startup becomes wildly successful. Hard work and random chance have smiled on you. To keep flirting with lady luck your system must scale. But how much stuff (space, hardware, software, etc) will you need to handle the growth, when will you need it and when will you need more?

That's what Flickr's John Allspaw helps you figure out in his ground breaking new book on capacity planning: The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources.

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In his new book Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

• JavaScript - Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.
• Network - Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.
• Browser - Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

About the Author

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He is also co-chair of Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O'Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day is the first book by an in-the-trenches practitioner of web analytics. It provides a unique insider’s perspective of the challenges and opportunities that web analytics presents to each person who touches the Web in your organization. Rather than spamming you with metrics and definitions, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day will enhance your mindset and teach you how to fish for yourself.

Avinash Kaushik is a expert in web analytics and author of the top-rated blog Occam’s Razor (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash). In this book, he goes beyond web analytics concepts and definitions to provide a step-by-step guide to implementing a successful web analytics strategy. His revolutionary approach to web analytics challenges prevalent thinking about the field and guides readers to a solution that will provide truly informed and actionable insights.