Performance-Related Books

Here is my updated list of performance-related books. Books are grouped into a few categories just for convenience – some books fit several categories and books definitely may be grouped differently. Inside each category books are arranged chronologically. Some older product-based books may probably be dropped – but keep them so far in case if they may be interesting to somebody working with older technologies.

Including in the list doesn’t mean that I endorse or recommend every book – just that it is related to performance and from what I saw at some point may be useful for some categories of readers. Some books may be outdated or be only marginally useful.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Let me know if there are other books to add to the list (or maybe some should be removed from the list).

Performance Engineering

Performance Engineering of Software Systems by Connie U. Smith, 1990.
High-Performance Client/Server by Chris Loosley and Frank Douglas, 1997.
Designing Concurrent, Distributed, and Real-Time Applications with UML by Hassan Gomaa, 2000.
Performance Solutions: A Practical Guide to Creating Responsive, Scalable Software by Connie U. Smith and Lloyd G. Williams, 2001.
by John D. Musa, 2004.
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications by Cal Henderson,2006.
Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle, 2006.
Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software by Steven C. Seow, 2008.
The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher, 2009.
Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach by Henry H. Liu, 2009.
Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, 2010.
Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher, 2011.

Java

Performance Analysis for Java Websites by Stacy Joines, et al, 2002.
Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition) by Jack Shirazi, 2003
Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz, et al, 2006.
Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization by Steven Haines, 2006.
Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, 2008.
Java Performance by Charlie Hunt and Binu John, 2008.
Java Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach by Henry H. Liu, 2013.

.Net

Professional ASP.NET Performance by Matt Odhner, et al, 2002.
Maximizing .NET Performance by Nick Wienholt, 2003.
Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications by Jeffrey Hasan and Kenneth Tu, 2003.
Improving .Net Application Performance and Scalability (Patterns & Practices), Microsoft, 2004.
Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET by Colin Campbell, et al, 2010.
.NET Performance Testing and Optimization – The Complete Guide by Paul Glavich and Chris Farrell, 2010.
ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets by Matt Perdeck, 2010
Pro .NET Performance: Optimize Your C# Applications by Sasha Goldshtein, et al, 2012.
Ultra-Fast ASP.NET 4.5 by Rick Kiessig, 2012

WPO

Web Performance Tuning by Patrick Killelea, 2002
High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers by Steve Souders, 2007.
Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew King, 2008.
Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, 2009.
Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers by Steve Souders, 2009.
JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov, 2010.
High Performance JavaScript (Build Faster Web Application Interfaces) by Nicholas C. Zakas, 2010.
Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 by Stoyan Stefanov, et al, 2012.
Professional Website Performance: Optimizing the Front-End and Back-End by Peter Smith, 2012.

APM/Monitoring

Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, 2009.
The Definitive Guide to Application Performance Management by Greg Shields, 2010.
APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management by Michael J. Sydor, 2010.
Effective Monitoring and Alerting: For Web Operations by Slawek Ligus, 2012.
Monitoring with Ganglia by Matt Massie, et al, 2012.
Application Performance Management: A Practical Introduction by Sampath I Prakash and John J Sikora, 2012.

Performance Testing

Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications, Microsoft, 2002.
J2EE Performance Testing by Peter Zadrozny, et al, 2003.
Integrated Approach to Web Performance Testing: A Practitioner’s Guide by B. M. Subraya, 2006.
Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Microsoft, 2007.
The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance by Ian Molyneaux, 2009.
eBook Web Load Testing For Dummies by Scott Barber, 2011, available from Compuware after free registration.
Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9 by Bayo Erinle, 2013.

Performance Analysis/Management/Modeling/Capacity Planning

The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling by R. K. Jain, 1991.

The Practical Performance Analyst by Neil Gunther, 2000.
Scaling for E-Business: Technologies, Models, Performance, and Capacity Planning by Daniel A. Menasce and Virgilio A.F. Almeida, 2000.
Measuring Computer Performance: A Practitioner’s Guide by David J. Lilja, 2000.
Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods by Daniel A. Menasce and Virgilio A.F. Almeida, 2001.
Performance Assurance for IT Systems by Brian King, 2004.
Performance by Design: Computer Capacity Planning By Example by Daniel A. Menasce, et al, 2004.
Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services by Neil J. Gunther, 2006.
Fundamentals of Performance Engineering; You can’t spell firefighter without IT Perfect by Keith Smith and Bob Wescott, 2007.
The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources by John Allspaw, 2008.
Capacity Management (ITSM Library) by Adam Grummitt, 2009.
IT Systems Management by Rich Schiesser, 2010.
Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ by Neil J. Gunther, 2011.
ITIL Capacity Management, by Larry Klosterboer, 2011.
Solving Enterprise Applications Performance Puzzles: Queuing Models to the Rescue by Leonid Grinshpan, 2012.
Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action by Mor Harchol-Balter, 2013.
Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud by Brendan Gregg, 2013.
Every Computer Performance Book: How to Avoid and Solve Performance Problems on The Computers You Work With by Bob Wescott, 2013.

Operating Systems

Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet by Adrian Cockcroft and Richard Pettit, 1998.
Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning by Jason R Fink and Matthew D. Sherer, 2001.
Windows 2000 Performance Guide: Help for Administrators and Application Developers by Mark Friedman and Odysseas Pentakalos, 2002.
System Performance Tuning by Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and Mike Loukides, 2002.
HP-UX 11i Tuning and Performance by Robert F. Sauers, et al, 2004.
Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques by Steve Best, 2005.
Optimizing Linux Performance: A Hands-On Guide to Linux Performance Tools by Phillip G. Ezolt, 2005
Performance Tuning for Linux Servers by Sandra K. Johnson, et al, 2005.
Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris by Richard McDougall, et al, 2006.
Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power by Ken Milberg, 2009.
DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD by Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro, 2011.

Databases

SQL Performance Tuning by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, 2002.
SQL Tuning by Dan Tow, 2003.
Effective MySQL Optimizing SQL Statements by Ronald Bradford, 2011.
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication by Baron Schwartz, 2012.

Oracle Database

Optimizing Oracle Performance Paperback by Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt, 2003.
Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning by Richmond Shee, et al, 2004.
Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals by Jonathan Lewis, 2005.
Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference by Alexey B. Danchenkov, et al, 2006.
Troubleshooting Oracle Performance by Christian Antognini, 2008.
Oracle Database 11g Performance Tuning Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach by Sam Alapati, et al, 2011.
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques by Richard Niemiec, 2012.
Oracle SQL Tuning with Oracle SQLTXPLAIN by Stelios Charalambides, 2013

Microsoft SQL Server

The Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook by Ken England, 2001.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook by Ken England and Gavin JT Powell, 2007.
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Query Tuning and Optimization by Kalen Delaney, et al, 2007.
Professional SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning by Steven Wort, et al, 2008.
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled by Sajal Dam and Grant Fritchey, 2009.
Mastering SQL Server Profiler by Brad McGehee, 2009.
Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views (High Performance SQL Server) by Louis Davidson and Tim Ford, 2010.
Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer by Benjamin Nevarez, 2011.
SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning by Grant Fritchey, 2012.