Release It! by Michael T. Nygard is filled with "from the trenches" advice and stories of the sorts of things that all of us who have deployed software run into. Issues of "scale" and "availability" tend to be business issues of immediate impact and are often ill considered in the design and redesign of software.

The book covers stability and capacity with both patterns and anti-patterns. It also covers operations and general design from the perspective of "This is stuff I've seen go wrong, here's what we did, and here's what we learned." It can serve as an excellent litmus test for your own applications, and is full of useful suggestions that you should turn into software and systems on your next project.

"Production ready code" is the oft stated goal of an agile iteration. But what does that truly mean when you're not in production? When the scale and scope of the issues is not well defined? This book will give you an accurate picture of what production ready means, and what you can do to be better prepared.