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.
- Introduction
- Web Application Architecture
- Development Environments
- i18n, l10n, and Unicode
- Data Integrity and Security
- Remote Services
- Bottlenecks
- Scaling Web Applications
- Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
- 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.