Checkout highscalability.com, used to have lots of real word scalability issues and solutions back on the day.
If you want hands on experience, pick an open source app in the language you know and deploy it somewhere and load test till it breaks and see which part breaks first. It could be your load balancer can’t handle that many connections or you app server rubs out of memory or the db comes to a crawl. The more real world you can make load test queries the better.
Highscalability.com was great! I still follow their RSS feed but there's not a lot of new content nowadays. If someone knows a similar resource I'd love to hear about it!
If you want hands on experience, pick an open source app in the language you know and deploy it somewhere and load test till it breaks and see which part breaks first. It could be your load balancer can’t handle that many connections or you app server rubs out of memory or the db comes to a crawl. The more real world you can make load test queries the better.
At the very least you’ll get hands on experience.