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

Customer Rating:
Summary: High Performance Web Sites
Comment: 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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Customer Rating:
Summary: Optimizing the front-end experience
Comment: When conversation turns to performance, we often focus on the database, application servers, or a multitude of other backend processes, and completely forget about the front-end: CSS, JavaScript, filesizes, conditional requests, and request pipelining. In this book, Steve Souders documents the best practices for optimizing your front-end experience, which can often yield significant improvements with minimal code changes.

The detailed examples and associated discussions yield a lot of very useful tips - you'll definitely want to have this book near you. Likewise, the examples of dissecting the 10 most popular websites at the end of the book are very helpful, as they highlight the method, and also show how these practices have been adopted by different organizations.

Only word of forewarning: if you've read the YSlow documentation, then you won't find all that much new content in this book. Corollary: you can read the YSlow documentation to get many of the same tips and best practices, for free.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great for Frontend Engineers and Web Developers
Comment: I am no frontend engineer (these are people responsible for the performance of large web sites). However, I am always concerned with speed on the sites I run, so I decided to check out this book.

While most of the tips on it are strictly limited to things you can do only if you have access to your web server (Apache) settings, there's lots of useful information you can put to use if you are a web developer or simply if you have enough control over a web site, to be able to affect its performance (if you manage web content, this is your case).

Great examples of the use of the book to people beyond frontend engineers are recommendations about image types, stylesheet tips and things to do/avoid, in regards to JavaScript.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great, But is all Online
Comment: Great book, really! Easily read, an essential resource for anyone involved in web development, on any level!

However you can honestly find everything almost word for word online. In face if you just download the ySLow and firebug extentions for firefox you can go to any site and see how it uses these runs, and it will link to detailed info on each and everyone, all for free.

So if you hate reading online, then buy this, it is great, but seriosuly its free information.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Extremely informative on front end optimizations
Comment: The author Steve Souders (who at the time of publication was Chief Performance engineer at Yahoo, but is now at Google]) demonstrates fourteen methods that could be employed to increase web page download response times through clear and concise chapters.

The information presented within this book is kept simple and to the point, complete with small code samples and explanations as to why they work. Occasional comparison graphs are scattered throughout the book to illustrate the differences in response times when dealing with some of the methods discussed.

While some of the methods require server side configurations, most others can be dealt with directly by the web programmers themselves. The server side methods enables web developers who wish to make their own sites download faster make better informed decisions with regards to selecting a web hosting service provider by asking in advance what server configurations the hosting providers use.

Also scattered throughout the book are links to handy browser add-ons and other informative links in helping developers keep tabs on performance issues when developing their sites.

All in all, the author definitely knows what he is talking about. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to take their front end development skills higher by designing faster and more lightweight websites which result in better response times for visitors (not to mention save on monthly bandwidth).

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