I tore through Release It! in almost a day. It's a good book, easy read. I'm not sure if the title is correct. It's more about writing software that will let you sleep at night in production. Or at least if you get paged at 2am you have a hope in hell of figuring out what the problem is with your system.

He goes into the considerations you'd have, making choices early on in the construction of a project. What you want to build into the system so that it's easy to monitor, basically transparency. We're talking JMX and good logging, alarming. Of JMX he mentions how helpful it is to tune your application at runtime.

He goes through anecdotes about production Internet applications going down, what caused them, what prevented an easy fix and what was the ultimate solution. Sometimes they get long-winded but they provide good motivation for doing things right the first time.

I recommend the book. I currently find myself with the opportunity to do greenfield development for some serious web applications so for me at least it's timely.