Books this season
I bought two books between last month and this.
The first one was Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson, the Flickr guy showing the ropes with his team’s awesome pull job called, what else, Flickr, of which, I am a huge fan of.
The pricetag1 surprised me. Rs 325.002, and I got some discount as well over it, eventually paying less than Rs 300.00. Oreilly books are definitely cheaper in India3 than elsewhere.
This is apparently4 a good book for geeks behind the scenes. Having bought it and read it — cover to cover — it was insightful to learn about the woes of scaling. May be I will appreciate the efforts that go into reducing downtimes of service more now. Flickr is having a massage just got a new meaning.
The other was The Search by John Battelle. I have just started to read this. For some reason, this book is on the streets much more than others, implying its popularity. And in flavors5, because it was available on the street for Rs 60 (little more than a dollar).
- I bought this in a store near VT station, Bombay. [←]
- The same book, in Malaysia’s Kinukoniya store was priced at RM88.00 — that’s about more than twice the Indian pricetag. [←]
- May be that’s because they are published by Shroff Publishers (Oreilly’s reseller/partner?), which makes these books affordable. In any case, this is definitely good news for book shoppers. [←]
- Just not for me. I really don’t know why I picked-up this one. May be because it was something to do with websites. And curiosity got better of me. The underlying complexity is enormous for guys like me to truly appreciate reading such a book. [←]
- Probably illegal reprints. [←]