Release It!

While it might sound like a 37 Signals style plea to get software out there, Release It! from Michael Nygard is a totally different animal. It's a higher level "Code Complete" for large scale systems. It's about what to do so you can release it. A list of things you are doing that are increasing the risk of failure, and a list of things you can do to drop that risk.

Sample:
"Integration points are the number-one killer of systems. Every single one of those feeds presents a stability risk. Every socket, process, pipe, or remote procedure call can and will hang. Even database calls can hang, in ways obvious and subtle. Every feed into the system can hang it, crash it, or generate other impulses at the worst possible time. You’ll look at some of the specific ways these integration points can go bad and what you can do about them."

I wasn't really interested in the book until I heard the podcasts he did last year. A lot of sound advice in there...