[houk]

I'd start here - http://astore.amazon.com/possiboutpos-20

There's no one book telling you "this is how you should do blah". You have to research. You'll notice those books deal with scaling websites to millions of users but I always found the lesson they teach/preach to be really important.

Anyway, once you start covering those topics a lot you notice patterns and hopefully you can start to incorporate that sort of thinking into your own development.

One thing to remember. Good design/engineering is about simplicity and elegance. Those are two beautiful things.