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

This book is full of information that you just can't find anywhere else. So often, we rely on gross generalizations about what happens when the browser fetches a web page. This book explains, with great clarity, the details of what really happens, and how lots of small details affect performance dramatically. It gives specific recommendations for how to improve performance, and then dissects the top 10 sites and shows how they perform and why.

One of the most noticeable and least expensive improvements you can make to increase the speed of your website is to implement these front-end techniques. It is true that the 14 principles can be found in the description of the book, or with the excellent YSlow tool delivered by Yahoo! Developer Network. So why should you buy the book?? The book explains "why" these 14 principles are best, and it does so in a concise format. If you currently work professionally with the front-end side of a website (or would like to someday) this book should be considered a required read. At less than US$30, it is an inexpensive investment into your on-going education. Don't settle with just knowing "how" to make your site faster, get the book and learn "why" these steps make your site faster. You'll be a better and more valuable developer for it.

Not only does Steve Souders have the credentials to write this book (he's the chief performance guy for Yahoo!), he's also written a book that is an easy read and will give you everything you need to easily improve your web site performance. Each of the 14 tips is well explained together with examples from real world sites that show how the tip has been used or how it would have helped. Some are harder to do (Use a Content Delivery Network) if you're just working on a small site or an internal web application. But most are easy to implement (GZip components, Make JavaScript and CSS External) and you'll see the results immediately. This book should be on your Essential Reading bookshelf if you're a web developer or a member of the performance team for any organization. Keep it a secret and amaze your colleagues by making small changes and demonstrating big performance improvements. Alternately spread the word about this book and let everyone benefit. Oh, and if you already own Web Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Internet), don't be scared by this new book. It's a much easier read and it also is aware of Ajax and new web development techniques.

§ _High Performance Web Sites_ is one of those books that will get read by more people than buy it because it is both a fast read and organized into clearly differentiated subjects. This makes it easy to pick up for a moment or pass along to team members with different specialties. Each of these "14 Steps to Faster-Loading Web Sites" (listed in the editorial review above) is itself divided into related tips with practical pointers. The fact that the book is full of these pointers is not the only value I extracted. We also get something a bit more subtle. The fact that the author is a performance expert at one of the mega-companies that define the Web for most of us lends authority to the book. It is easy to have confidence that his practical experience will have immediate lessons for teams with the same problems, if on a smaller scale. Steve Souders provides a special addition to his tips: his example pages offer direct comparisons and means to make our own tests. This is something rarely encountered in such books. The book ends with a 30-page chapter where he deconstructs 10 of the top Web sites in the U.S. using the rules and tools described in the book. §