Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In this book, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

• JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.

• Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.

• Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

This book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

Faster and Faster - 2009-08-11
Reviewer Rating:
Today's Web developer knows that the speed of one's site is an important measure to its overall success, and Steve Souders' previous book, /High Performance Web Sites/ (O'Reilly), laid out what seemed to be every way to achieve good performance gains without the sacrifice of functionality or aesthetics. When I began reading Souders' /Even Faster Web Sites/, I therefore wondered how he could possibly demonstrate fresh ways to achieve performance gains without regurgitating the content of his previous book. What I discovered as I read /Even Faster Web Sites/ was it presented all new best practices for making your web sites "leaner and meaner" without repeating the content of his last book.

/Even Faster Web Sites/ takes the latest techniques available to developers and organizes them into three performance areas: JavaScript, network, and browser. Though I believe Souder knows what he is talking about regarding web site performance, I found it refreshing this time around that he had the contributions of other experts in the field to give their ideas on performance gains in these areas.

I thought the chapters on JavaScript, especially those discussing Ajax and asynchronous techniques, were well written and gave good, new best practices to trim time off the loading of content on a site. I also appreciated the chapter dealing with Comet, as these technologies are surely a driving force for future web applications, and having best practices early in their development will only help their progress. Of the two chapters on browser performance, I found the honesty of the discussion on the downsides of using iframes most helpful, especially when their use was discussed as a viable technique for improving performance early in the book. I did find the chapter on CSS selectors extremely useful for analyzing where slowdowns in styling may exist based on browser implementation. The chapters on network performance gave a good background on common hindrances such as connection limits and poor image choices, but also walked through what I felt were performance gains that can be made through less utilized techniques like chunked encoding and better compression.

Souder finished this book with an Appendix on performance tools that can be used to help in the improvement of a web site, which I found to be immensely helpful. While many tools he listed are well known to developers, there are some I was unaware of and began making use of immediately on my own sites.

/Even Faster Web Sites/ is an excellent follow-up to High Performance Web Sites, giving new best practices for making your web sites even faster. As I see it, even hundredths of a second begin to add up when you put all of these techniques together, and most of the techniques presented in this book are practical for any web site being developed. I would recommend this book to any developer looking for ways to improve the performance of his web site, as Souder has certainly demonstrated his knowledge and expertise on improving the speed of a site.

Real Value Here - 2009-07-09
Reviewer Rating:

I don't think I have had a book this intriguing and valuable in my hand in a long while. You will harvest a measurable return on investment from "Even Faster Web Sites" if you are concerned with both the technical implementation and user experience aspects of your Web work.

Chapter 4 (Loading Scripts Without Blocking) introduces and reviews several ways that the referencing of scripts can degrade page performance and user experience. Test pages are provided to make clear each assertion by the author. After the *problem* is clarified, the author discusses alternative solutions and their impact on a range of circumstances. The details can get involved, but the writing is clear and focused. The ends that *you* need are kept to the fore. Souders summarizes all his tests in a decision tree that gives you the preferred approach depending on your requirements. That decision tree and the motivations behind it in this chapter alone reduce the price of this book to insignificance.

Any Web team with a copy of this book handy will surely waste less time debating "truisms" and "old developer lore" that often intrudes into our discussions. Souders and the other contributing authors have done us a great service here.

A Minor Disappointment - 2009-10-10
Reviewer Rating:
After really liking Steve Souders' "High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers", I really wanted to like his latest offering "Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers". I liked it, but not nearly as much.

While "High Performance Web Sites" is centered around Souders' "14 Rules" for better web performance, "Even Faster Web Sites" isn't rule-oriented. Instead, it is organized into the three areas of JavaScript performance, network performance, and browser performance. And six of the fourteen chapters were written by contributing authors, rather than by Sounders himself.

All this adds up to a somewhat uneven, and less widely applicable, set of ideas.

A good book, but still a minor disappointment.

a must read for front-end engineers - 2009-09-15
Reviewer Rating:
An important note is that this book isn't 2nd edition of O'Reilly high performance web sites, it's totally new book starts where O'Reilly high performance web sites finishs, it contain new researches, techniques and best practiceses, written by web front-end performance guru Steve Souders and co-authored by well known experets: Chapter1 about Ajax performance and performance wisdom written by Douglas Crockford the discoverer of JSON data interchange format and JavaScript architect at Yahoo . Chapter2 about responsiveness, threading and latency written by the guys of Ajaxian blog Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. Chapter3 about defering the load of unused functions and libs and spliting the intial payload written by Steve Souders. Chapter4 about loading scripts without blocking techniques and the benefits of each technique and its effect on user experience like busy indicators and browser behavior of ordered execution. Chapter5 about coupling async loaded scripts with inline script techniques and the benefir of each and its uses in real world libs like Dojo and YUI loader. Chapter6 about positioning inline elements and its blocking behaviour and how to overcome this. Chapter7 about effecient performant JavaScript best practices written by Nicholas Zakas the Author of Wrox JavaScript for web developers. Chapter8 about Comet a.k.a reverse ajax performance written by Dylan Schiemann the CEO of sitepen and the cofounder of DoJo. Chapter9 about how to enhance performance of the users who can't take advantage of Gzipping by Tony Gentilcore, software engineer at google. Chapter10 about Optimizaing images written by nichole sullivan the author of Object Oriented CSS and Stoyan stefanov the author of Packet Object Oriented JavaScript and both work at yahoo. Chapter 11 Sgarding Dominamt domains, Chapter 12 Flushing Document early, Chpater13 using iframes sparingly, Chapter14 simlifying CSS selectors performance all by Steve Souders and at the end of the book performance tools reference . after all it's a must read book for front end engineers and any one want to make even faster web sites .

A fundamental book for Web Developers - 2009-07-14
Reviewer Rating:
This, along with the previous book is truly an essential for any web developer. Get it, read it, live it.

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