Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
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
Average Rating: ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Based on 7 Ratings
"Classic of front end performance books" - by mjmurphy3 on 19-MAY-2011
Reviewer Rating: ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
This book should be considered required reading for all DHTML programmers and operations people who support web applications!
This is not a web programming book per se, nor does it cover configuring specific web servers (although there are short examples of both where relevant). It really is just a very specific tutorial on how to optimize page rendering times using a trove of well proven "web performance patterns".
I will never look at cute tricks like loading scripts one at a time via ajax into the DOM's script element with a progress bar the same way again... that is utterly pitiful performance wise and does not even leverage the browsers basic capabilities. Browser behavior for the DNS, resource cache, and parallel downloads is explained very well in this book.
Not all suggestions will apply to a given application, but they are extremely practical and provide a good checklist for your own web page performance analysis. Some items will fall to the developer and some will fall the web server/operations people, showing the need for collaboration in dealing with the subject.
Report as Inappropriate
Top Level Categories:
Information Technology & Software Development
Sub-Categories:
Information Technology & Software Development > Web Development

Download Chapter
0 TokensColophon
The publisher has provided additional content related to this title.
Description | Content |
|---|---|
Visit the catalog page for High Performance Web Sites |
|
Visit the errata page for High Performance Web Sites |
|