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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 40 Ratings

If you work on the web, and haven't read this, you're doing it wrong - 2010-01-02
Reviewer Rating:
Steve Souders is an absolute genius. He generously shares his knowledge, in digestible tidbits, and structures everything so that its easy to grasp a complex topic (front-end website optimization) in a very reasonable amount of time.

Whenever I hire someone for web development, I make them read this book before doing a single line of code. Whether you're a CSS designer who never does back-end work, or a Ruby on Rails guru who'd never dream of opening Photoshop/Gimp, this book strikes a common chord that all web developers need to understand.

Of the scores of computer books that I've read, none of them has resonated so much and for so long as this book. My websites are better because of it, and everyone that I've lent this book to says that same thing.

A must have for every web developer - 2009-11-29
Reviewer Rating:
This book lays down nicely all the theory needed to speed up web sites. It's easy to read and IMHO is an essential one for every web developer.

A Great Checklist For The Web Developer - 2009-10-10
Reviewer Rating:
In High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Steve Souders explains that at least 80 percent of the time it takes to display a web page happens after the HTML document has been downloaded, and describes the importance of the techniques in this book.

The book is a quick read containing some good hints and tips. Many are fairly easily investigated and implemented in most companies.

Seemingly out of place, however, is Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. While it's certainly a good way to improve performance, it's not something every company can afford.

Overall, an interesting book.

Expensive, thin book with great ideas only a few of whch can be implemented by non-IT people - 2009-03-23
Reviewer Rating:
There can be little dispute that the information contained in this very thin volume is of great value to anyone interested in website optimization.

Your site could benefit greatly by putting into practice the '14 performance rules' espoused in this book. You will learn abut the importance of making fewer HTTP requests, reducing DNS lookups, minifying javascript, avoiding redirects and other important "rules".

The book is written in a very authoritative manner. Whether you will actually be able to implement -all- the rules is doubtful as some of the rules are extremely technical in nature and execution. Creating CSS Sprite Images, for instance, is not something many people would be able to execute, nor is minifying javascript or using a Content Delivery Network. Some of the rules are geared towards large websites backed by companies with pockets deep enough to finance the solutions suggested by the rules.

The main problem I have with this book is the price. You can EASILY find this information all over the Internet. In fact, as it turns out the author of this book is the author of a plugin for Firefox (in conjunction with the Firebug extension) called YSLOW. He has also written the online help for YSLOW on the Yahoo Developer Network. Consequently a large portion of the essential information in this book is actually available online for no cost whatsoever.

So the book is great and very valuable. It's convenient to have the information in a book form... but the price is pretty steep for such readily available, easily obtainable information.

Content: 5 stars | Cost: 3 stars | Overall: 4 stars

Not really what I was expecting - 2009-05-12
Reviewer Rating:
By the title, I expected this book to cover configuring Apache, MySQL, PHP, Memcache, etc for high performance. Instead, this book covers optimization of client side code. The chapters appear to coincidence with Yahoo's YSlow plugin for Firefox (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/).

Although it wasn't particularly useful for me, this would be an essential reference for a newbie web developer who is not sure about things like headers, Content Deliver Networks (CDN), or things of that nature.

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