StartupIsrael book shelf

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applicatio author: Cal Henderson rating: asin: 0596102356 binding: Paperback list price: $39.99 USD amazon price: $26.39 USD

A book detailing how to build and maintain "scalable" web sites. This is a must book if you want to get great tips about building your site, maintaining it, and making sure it is scalable. It also talks about security, performance, optimization, i18n, benchmarking and more issues. It mostly deals with the LAMP architecture, but the ideas can also be helpful for other platforms.

Highly recommended!

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means author: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi rating: asin: 0452284392 binding: Paperback list price: $15.00 USD amazon price: $10.50 USD

An interesting book about networks. The author discusses several types of networks (cells in our body, terrorist networks, the internet infrastructure, the web, etc.) and their features. There's an historic account of how this science has evolved in recent years.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days author: Jessica Livingston asin: 1590597141 binding: Hardcover list price: $25.99 USD amazon price: $17.15 USD

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.