Fantastic book, really

I read the "Building Scalable Web" book first since it's from a famous publisher, O'Reilly, and talk about a famous website, Flickr.

But, this book is a whole lot better.

When it comes to scale a server, it's never about which tool do you use. It's more like philosophical decisions that you constantly need to make. The BSW book talks about tools a lot, but not about the decision making process and the impacts/reason/trade off for each decision. This book covers it all.

If you have time to read only one book, get this one.