In a post at oreilley.net Tim O'Reilly give a nice tip of the hat to the folks that slave away trying to shared knowledge about building web sites that are available, scalable, reliable, and performant. He mentions a new book that just made their "internet best seller" list recently. The book was "High Performance Web Sites" by Steve Souder.

Since I read the book in its pre-release PDF form I'll do a little mini-review here. I can pretty safely say that if you are a programmer or administrator embroiled in building web sites that you would like to actually work if they get popular you should read this book. I'd also recommend it for managers of development teams. The way the book is broken down is easily digestible and good for getting ideas across to your team. In summary, buy it and read it. It's not revolutionary in most cases but it's just good sense all around and it's the stuff you just scratch your head about because you figured your devs and admins just knew this stuff anyway. But, they just might not.

Oh, there is another link out in the article to the "High Performance MySQL" book. Don't buy that one. It's in the process of being re-written right now and is SERIOUSLY in need of such a thing. It's a great book, but the content is just a bit to dated for my liking. Here's the blog where you can follow the re-writing of that book. They are even taking feedback to incorporate. Pretty cool and shows you publishing really has changed a quite a bit in the last few years. Here are some of the recent posts to that blog about the writing of the new edition.

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/10/07/high-performance-mysql-second-edition-query-performance-optimization/
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/10/05/high-performance-mysql-second-edition-advanced-sql-functionality/
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/10/02/progress-on-high-performance-mysql-backup-and-recovery-chapter/