Deesign and Deploy Production-Ready Software The pragmatic programmers
Paperback, 350 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 2007 by Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?
If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.
In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.
Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.
Was ahead of it's time and introduced many novel concepts and was an eye opener for me when it comes to designing and developing distributed systems.
There is a Second edition from 2018
You're wasting time reading this review, you could be reading this book instead.
Release It! is one of the most important books I think programmers can read, easily as important as the oft-cited classics like The Pragmatic Programmer or the GoF book. Release It! isn't about writing super-spiffy code, or object-oriented design, but it should drastically affect how professional programmers write their code. It focuses on what engineers need to do to get their software into a state where it can actually be deployed safely in a production environment. It covers patterns and antipatterns to support (or subvert) stability as well as capacity, and the section of the book covering this is simply excellent. But then it goes beyond that to also discuss Operational enablement. Even if you're not into DevOps, and don't want to really be involved in DevOps work, this book gives you the tools and tips to …
You're wasting time reading this review, you could be reading this book instead.
Release It! is one of the most important books I think programmers can read, easily as important as the oft-cited classics like The Pragmatic Programmer or the GoF book. Release It! isn't about writing super-spiffy code, or object-oriented design, but it should drastically affect how professional programmers write their code. It focuses on what engineers need to do to get their software into a state where it can actually be deployed safely in a production environment. It covers patterns and antipatterns to support (or subvert) stability as well as capacity, and the section of the book covering this is simply excellent. But then it goes beyond that to also discuss Operational enablement. Even if you're not into DevOps, and don't want to really be involved in DevOps work, this book gives you the tools and tips to do what aspect of DevOps is the purview of pure developers.
Nobody who writes production enterprise software should write another line of code until they read this book. I honestly can't give it enough of a glowing endorsement. Like any other patterns book, a great deal of it will be familiar to people who have been in the industry for a while, and have come up with (or encountered) its principles on their own. But I guarantee, if there's a single thing in the book you haven't seen before, it'll be worth reading the entire book, pretty much every section is gold.
My only complaint about it is that Michael Nygard has a tendency to go on randomish tangents, especially when talking about "case studies," which generally come off as the author trying too hard to convince the reader he knows what he's talking about. A lot of these stories are about things he personally encountered in his career, and how he fixed them, and each one has a weird arrogant quality, it's a little offputting to be honest, like Nygard is almost bragging. I get that these sections underscore the value of the ideas in the book, but there's something about how they're written that comes off boastful, or irritating in a way I can't quite put into words. What's more, the book STARTS with a particularly long one of these kinds of stories, making it kind of tough to get into the book. I actually tried to read it years ago and gave up on it very early. Only recently did I decide to revisit it and keep pushing forward (based on a co-worker's recommendation) and I'm extremely glad I did.
I highly, highly recommend picking up this book and reading it cover to cover. It's a struggle at first due to the unfortunate decision to start it off with one of the most annoying sections of the book, but I implore you to power through it and keep reading. It's worth it.
