Slightly dated, but I recommend Cal's book on the lessons we learned scaling Flickr, http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

Also remember that premature scaling is one of the leading causes of failure.

If scalability is relevant to your product, this is an accessible classic:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

For frontend stuff:

High Performance Web Sites Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (By Steve Souders) http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307

And for an intro to scalability:

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications (By Cal Henderson) http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

Hehe...perhaps it didn't really surprise me so much, maybe I was just hoping for it to be a bit better!

I really don't like code that "hacks together" a solution and then requires a substantial remedy later (who does?!) so I'm quite interested in getting it right from the beginning.

Assuming that many of us here develop web applications, and that some are going to need to scale heavily, what do you recommend as a good solution?

I have yet to read either of these two books, but they are on my list (I only have one at home, the other I'll order): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderso... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Technique...

Both are O'Reilly so I'm assuming they'll be good!

Let me know if you have any other resources for this, because I imagine it's a very common issue for successful startups.