I don't think interviewing for highly technical positions at Facebook could be "prepared" for, not especially, by reading so many books about high-level subjects (ex: Visual Basic).
A better approach would be books involving POSIX standards, implementations of all (current) OSI layers, compsci algorithms, how compilers work, and how various runtimes work for various interpreted languages and how to debug them (PHP, Ruby, Python, Obj-C, Java). None of these have anything to do with unix system administration, user permissions, shell scripting, or web servers.
"What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale."
You maybe misunderstanding macro and micro; scale is a function of both, not one or the other.
A better approach would be books involving POSIX standards, implementations of all (current) OSI layers, compsci algorithms, how compilers work, and how various runtimes work for various interpreted languages and how to debug them (PHP, Ruby, Python, Obj-C, Java). None of these have anything to do with unix system administration, user permissions, shell scripting, or web servers.
"What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale."
You maybe misunderstanding macro and micro; scale is a function of both, not one or the other.