Like many out there, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of Building Scalable Websites, by Cal Henderson. I got my copy this week and ripped through it in about 48 hours. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed.
Probably, I was unconconciously holding the book up the standard of Philip Greenspun's writings, including "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" and "Internet Application Workbook", which are both still pretty good reads on the fundamentals of engineering web applications. Much has changed since the mid 90's which is why Building Scalable Websites could have been a great update. My major complaints are three:
- No Flickr war stories!! Where's the story about wiping out a terabyte of photos and having to miraculously rescue the data from barely working tape? Or rolling out a feature and subsequently having 36 hours of downtime? This is where Greenspun really excels, and it definitely helps break up the monotony of the rote listing of applicable technologies.
- Shallowness. Overall, I felt the text covered topics just enough to convince a reader of the author's proficiency but not enough to transmit insight or at least the hairy details. For example, in Chapter 10, Spread is discussed as a technology for reliable multicasting of logging information. Good idea! And I know a little bit about Spread including the fact that Spread doesn't provide flow control, which means if a client can't keep up, data gets lost. I have to imagine this limitation is an issue in large scale websites, but no mention in the book. It felt like the discussion barely scraped the surface of the topic. I wonder how many of the other sections similarly lacked depth.
- No images?! On the cover is a brazen black band in the corner with "The Flickr Way". I think there's exactly one image in the book, a poor photo at that. This is irony. It's also another area where Building Scalable... falls short in comparison to Philip and Alex's... . The images in that book, while astoundingly superfluous (depending on your sense of humor), were also astoundingly beautiful and helped break up the text of Philip's book, which never seemed to drag for me.