Those of you who liked my Database War Stories series of posts are going to love Cal Henderson’s new book, Building Scalable Web Sites. Cal is of course the lead web developer for Flickr, and the guy who put fear into the hearts of IT shops everywhere by his reported practice of putting builds of Flickr out to the net every half hour, demonstrating just how different web development can be from traditional software development. In this book, he gives practical advice on everything from web application architecture, to development environments, to performance optimization and database scaling. Not to mention Web services API design. Oh, and how to do it all on the cheap. Definitely one for my Web 2.0 reading list.