High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers | Steve Souders

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers | Steve Souders | High Performance Web Sites

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High Performance W...

	High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Steve Souders O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007 - 168 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process. Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to: Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a Content Delivery Network Add an Expires Header Gzip Components Put Stylesheets at the Top Put Scripts at the Bottom Avoid CSS Expressions Make JavaScript and CSS External Reduce DNS Lookups Minify JavaScript Avoid Redirects Remove Duplicates Scripts Configure ETags Make Ajax Cacheable If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable. "If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place.Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore." -Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector "Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance." -Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

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It works! After this lecture my site becomes 90% faster

This book brings 2 kinds of tricks: the ones that are right under your nose and you never think about it and ones that you possible never would hear about unless you read this book.

This book was very helpful. Applying this rules I made my website about to 90% faster than before.

High Performance Web Sites

I remember when I first started using the Internet. Dial ups were extremely slow at the time, so I'd type in a URL, then go make a sandwich. By the time I came back, hopefully the page would be loaded.

Today, we expect more. Often if a page takes more than a few moments to load, I don't bother. I tend to equate professional with quick. If a site doesn't load quickly or if parts of the page are slow, I naturally assume that the information provided might be as shabbily compiled. I simply move onto a different page.

High Performance Web Sites looks at how we can make our own websites load more quickly. I was surprised at how many different little things that can be done beyond optimizing graphics. Most of these things only take a few little nips and tucks and none were beyond my novice level of ability.

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High Performance Web Sites

Great discussion of common web site performance problems (and how to fix them). The author focuses on content serving, which he claims is where 80-90% of the user response time is spent. Is that really true once you go beyond large web sites such as Yahoo! that have already put a lot of effort into optimizing their back-ends? In any case, the book is so well done I can't not recommend it -- even if most of the information can be found on the web (look for talks given by the author, or the YSlow web site). The only criticism is that the book is rather slim: I'm sure there is a lot more to be said (e.g. on browser rendering performance issues). Looking forward to reading part 2!

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Great Content, but not much unique in book-to-Web comparison

So this book is definitely a must-read for any front end folk. It shows how to make sites trim, slick and usable using some simple, sometimes common sense approaches that manage to elude the best of us before we read the book. Not only that, it provides a hierarchy of proven, scientific (maybe not in the traditional sense but certainly field-tested) hard evidence showing why the tricks are in the order they are.

This book and YSlow can definitely help make any site feel more responsive, and maybe shave dollars off bandwidth bills!

Great book on web site performance

So you're web site seems slow, users have to wait a long time for pages to render. Is it time to start looking at your database, and webserver configs? Perhaps not, there's a lot to be gained by following a few simple rules in your front end.

This is a well written, well edited book with only a few minor editing issues. That makes it the best of many I've read recently.

So what's in this book.

The first two chapters introduce the problem and give you some background information about HTTP requests and caching which are useful to understand the next 15 chapters.

This book goes through 14 different techniques to improve the amount of time from the first request to the the completion of the page being rendered. Thus improving the perceived responsiveness of the web site.

There's a useful explanation of the difference between HTTP 1.1 and 1.0 with regards to how browsers (IE and Firefox) will limit (based on the standards) the amount of parallel downloads from the server.

The chapters are in order of highest impact to improve performance to least.

Here's the Chapter list:
1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicates Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable

In each chapter the author introduces the issue, explains the rule and solution, and then provides some example pages to demonstrate the effectiveness of each rule.

Nearly every chapter had an "aha" moment for me.

The author worked on the Yahoo properties analyzing and suggesting improvements. It will come as no surprise that in chapter 15, where he looks at the top 10 US sites and analyzes which rules are and aren't being followed for those sites that Yahoo comes out near the top.

If you work on websites, front end or back end, it would be worth your time to read this book. At only 137 pages of content, it won't eat a hugh amount of time, and I think you'll find that your info/time to read ratio will compare favorably to many many other books.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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