Time was you did systems and networking work, you had The Library. Programming Perl , sendmail , DNS and Bind , TCP/IP Illustrated , UNIX System Administration Handbook . These books documented the core knowledge to operate effectively in our industry. You’d add others as your level of badassery increased, perhaps Mastering Regular Expressions , Internet Routing Architectures , or APUE , depending on your passions and your role.

Times have changed. You still need to have all the old knowledge, but you need quite a bit more to meet the bar in the modern, massive-scale, online services world. Thousands of servers, distributed storage, databases with billions of rows, real-time monitoring of it all. The books below should be in your library and considered core for you and anyone else in the field.

Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle

Architecture is the most important thing in building and operating a scalable service, and this book is the best book around on the topic. Read it, internalize its message, build better systems. I’ve never met him, but all signs point to Theo being an awesome guy, to boot. His blog is here .

Solaris Performance and Tools by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, and Brendan Gregg

You’ve got your badass architecture laid out, code written, now what? You need visibility as far into your system as you can manage so you know the state of the world and where you can make the most impact in server and application performance. Enter DTrace. Yes, this is a book about Solaris, but DTrace is built into OS X and FreeBSD (and Apache, thanks, Theo!) now, as well. DTrace is a quiet revolution in system performance monitoring. Master it.

A couple of the authors blog often enough to matter: Richard McDougall’s is here and Brendan Gregg’s is here .

High Performance MySQL by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, and Derek Balling

Database tuning has always been a bit of voodoo to me, perhaps because most of my exposure to it has been ninjas like the DB architects at Amazon tuning Oracle to within an inch of its life. This book demystifies the space, and thank goodness, because you are going to need it to get the most out of your infrastructure. How can you go wrong with folks like Jeremy Zawodny? You can’t. Here’s his blog .

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

You’ve mastered your architecture, instrumented your servers, and learned to tune the crap out of your databases. Now you can, and should, turn your attention to the performance experienced by your users. That was the whole point, right? Steve Souders created YSlow while Chief Performance Yahoo! at the purple giant, and is now doing similarly useful work at the GOOG. Follow him here .

The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw

Let’s get this out of the way: I love this book! Allspaw knows capacity planning for online services because he lives and breathes it and his passion comes through clearly in his writing. Think “the cloud” world of dynamic, on-demand resources free you from having to do real capacity planning? Think again. Now you have to do it even faster and the flexibility of the new tools means you will discover and exploit all sorts of new capacity planning and management techniques. Get the latest from John here .

So, there you have it! Get to reading and then get to building.