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

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While the information in the book is good information to know, it is (as others have said) information that pretty much gave a "yeah, I knew that" type of impression. And at only 137 pages of text, it's a very light read. If you are a new web developer, this is a nice collection of tips. As an experienced developer, there's nothing new here. And at $29 for its minimal 137 pages, it's really just an expensive checklist of 14 simple items. Too pricey for what you get in my opinion.

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_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.
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The ideas in the book are excellent. I'm all for an organized checklist of techniques to make web sites faster. The problem, is that once you have read the documentation for Yslow (the firebug plugin that grades sites based on these criteria) you will find the book provides little to no more substantive information. I had looked forward to it, purchased it, and have since given it away. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I love the ideas, but this book just didn't deliver.

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.

This book is small but contains a good collection of basic items everyone should know and use. Especially good in that most of these are simple but make a big difference to end-users, though this is all focused on the HTML/Web front-end and not databases or anything else regarding websites.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1CYIO1SY8WKEN One of the author's of: AdvancED Flex Application Development: Building Rich Media X (Advanced)

Not much that you probably don't already know or couldn't find on the web for free. Worth A read I guess but I definitely wouldn't buy it again.

Everyone prefers faster websites. Following the steps in this short book will measurably improve your site's performance with a minimum of effort.

If you're running a small site, the simple steps in this book might take you an afternoon to implement, and speed your site's performance by 25% or more.

For a major site, implementing the best practices might take you a few days, and save you thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth. Following the guidance that Steve lays out in this book has saved my company over $10,000 a month in bandwidth bills alone, and visitor satisfaction soared along with the site performance.

Highly recommended.

When optimizing a website, a lot of focus is usually placed on the back-end (databases, server-side code, etc.). That's because most programmers are comfortable with such matters. Once the HTML is emitted, it's easy to think "not my problem".

This book, however, is written by someone (a Yahoo engineer) who knows the front end (how the emitted HTML performs for the user) *is* often the biggest problem.

Instead of vague generalities, you'll find precise prescriptions (14, in fact) that when applied will make your site faster. The prescriptions are well-supported with both the *reasons* as well as examples of live URLs with and without the rules applied.

This book should be required reading for your whole engineering team. If you ran a series of brown-bag lunches and applied 1 rule per week, at the end of a calendar quarter you'd have a much snappier web site.

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.

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.

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.

I am a software performance tester and a teacher of performance testers. This is the best single reference I have found to assist software testers in learning what to look for in terms of what will have significant negative impact on the user perceived response time of a web site. In fact, I've incorporated the lessons from this book into my training course for performance testers and provide copies of this book to my students along with my own book about performance testing.

As far as I am concerned, this book should be required reading for anyone who develops or tests the performance of web sites.

A web, database and compiled application developer of over 7 years, I read a lot. Typically about a thousand pages a week worth of technical books (cover to cover, my wife thinks I'm nuts). Having read this one recently it is the first to have compelled me to write an Amazon book review.

My hat is off to Steve Souders. The book is perfectly organized and packed with his valuable insights into what matters most when working to optimize website performance.

To everyone thinking about buying this book, I encourage you to do so. It's a great read and can give even seasoned web programmers valuable new insights into how to improve site performance. Steve is one of those rare authors that is both smart enough to boil complex subjects down into simple explanations and nice enough to do it for his readers with a consistency that is rare even among the best technical writers. To top it all he manages to do so with a light, frank style.

A joy to read. Thanks Steve. Can't wait for your next book.

Thin book, chocked full of good information backed by research. This guy is a Yahoo! front end engineer. No slouch here. He didn't write this just to get a book published and he makes more at Yahoo! than he would off a highly specialized book like this. His premise is correct, everyone focuses on the back-end server side of the web in order to speed things up. He gives the tip, what research he's done to back it up, and also why it works that way. He points you to other publications for deep background information. Its an excellent programmer's book. A newbie can read this too, but a typical non-programmer would not understand the material very well.

If you are looking to speedup your website - start here.

This easy read covers 14 front-end performance tips. Not all may be applicable. Any tips implemented resulting in improving your user's experience, be it a high-traffic website or a corporate intranet, is worth the cost of the book.

Wow. What a great book.

I took this book, because it is very short, just 168 pages. I asked myself, what this guy can say in just 168 pages about performance? Maybe some introduction to the topic? First two chapters just confirmed my assumptions. There is nothing new, just some general information that I already knew.

How big was my surprise when I finished chapter 3 - first rule (out of 14). Author was able to explain what is the problem with too many http requests and how to make fewer requests. Even I am not a performance guru (just a developer) it was clear enough how should I build my web pages in the future. Even more, he gave me a felling that I should change my current pages.

Next couple chapters are even better, especially description how important is to put css and js imports in the correct place on web page, and how big impact they might have when they are in wrong place. The chapters about Expiry headers and ETags are also awesome. Author describes how cache in web browser works, what are conditional gets and how to make a proxy more efficient.

I finished a book with a feeling that I can easily change my pages to work much faster than they are today. And you know what - I will not spend much time for that one.

I recommend this book for everybody who writes web pages even for personal use. You will be surprised how big amount of knowledge you can get from 168 pages.

When I saw the title of this book regarding high performance in displaying web sites, I surmised correctly that the greatest benefit of this book would be for huge high-traffic commercial web sites. However, after checking the list of the fourteen rules provided to improve the performance of the rendering of the web pages of a web site, I felt
that I could profit from the application of the rules in the book even on the much smaller web sites that I maintain.
Although one does not need to understand the workings of retrieving web documents from a server and properly rendering them to your computer, the author uses the first two chapters in explaining how this is done, focusing mostly on the aspects that affect performance. The workings of the basic HTTP instruction, which requests the HTML document (the web page) from the server and downloads the contents of the document to your computer, is explained in great detail so that we can better understand the fourteen steps presented in the book as the way to obtain faster-loading web sites.
The first rule states that we need to make fewer HTTP requests with some suggestions as how to do this without sacrificing the design of the web site. Other rules show how using header instructions in our HTML code, we can enhance use of cache control and compression to increase document loading performance. Several of the rules involve CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)and Javascript scripting, describing how to design them and where to place them (top or bottom) in the HTML code to enhance
performance. These last rules work just as well for the smaller web sites as they do for the larger web sites. Other rules, like one that involves mutliple web servers to enhance web content delivery, are useful only for larger web sites.
A web developer interested in improving the downloading performance of his web sites will find this book very useful and will find the rules easy to apply. The developer need not understand fully the reasons behind the rules to effectively implement them into the HTML code of his web sites. I would definitely recommend this book to developers interested in improving the downloading performance of their web sites.

This book is extremely well organized and easy to read. It is code-oriented; server and database tuning are not addressed though some general ideas are discussed in passing.

Narrative explanations are combined with real world examples and code samples to illustrate each of the fourteen "rules" for tuning a web site. He clearly explains the pros and cons of each option, and why some techniques are better than others. He provides a primary recommendation but also discusses other options at length. This book is scalable to help developers of small-business web sites up to enterprise e-commerce sites.

Many of the "rules" are not necessarily a surprise to anyone with much web development experience. However the speed comparison charts and illustrations are extremely helpful, and many helpful "gold nuggets" of information are also sprinkled throughout.

After a full read, this book is now on my shelf within easy reach so that I can refer to the invaluable tips and code samples. I highly recommend that any serious web developer add this book to their bookshelf!

This book is an excellent guide for web developers looking to write optimized HTML. The book is organized into 14 categories of performance enhancements with a chapter decicated to each category. There is also a chapter on techniques in use by top websites, a chapter on HTTP as it applies to performace, and a chapter on the "Golden Rule" of web page preformance (Most time is not spend downloading the main page).

With each of the performance category chapters is a break down of the tips and tricks that allow browsers to load, fetch and/or render pages faster. Some rules (such as using a content delivery network) would apply to large or enterprize sites but the majority of the hints can be used on any web page down to the smallest home page.

The book is well organized and easy to use. The font and page size are good for reading while sitting at a computer. The reference section which gives links to examples for each tip in the book is outstanding. It is broken down by chapter, then by tip within chapters.

The presentation is form the point of view of performance so there was material on how the browser works internally as well as explanations of external browser behavior.

Overall, this is a very nice guide of web site performance ideas.

So you're web site seems slow, users have to wait a long time for pages to render. Is it time to start looking at your database, and webserver configs? Perhaps not, there's a lot to be gained by following a few simple rules in your front end.

This is a well written, well edited book with only a few minor editing issues. That makes it the best of many I've read recently.

So what's in this book.

The first two chapters introduce the problem and give you some background information about HTTP requests and caching which are useful to understand the next 15 chapters.

This book goes through 14 different techniques to improve the amount of time from the first request to the the completion of the page being rendered. Thus improving the perceived responsiveness of the web site.

There's a useful explanation of the difference between HTTP 1.1 and 1.0 with regards to how browsers (IE and Firefox) will limit (based on the standards) the amount of parallel downloads from the server.

The chapters are in order of highest impact to improve performance to least.

Here's the Chapter list:
1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicates Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable

In each chapter the author introduces the issue, explains the rule and solution, and then provides some example pages to demonstrate the effectiveness of each rule.

Nearly every chapter had an "aha" moment for me.

The author worked on the Yahoo properties analyzing and suggesting improvements. It will come as no surprise that in chapter 15, where he looks at the top 10 US sites and analyzes which rules are and aren't being followed for those sites that Yahoo comes out near the top.

If you work on websites, front end or back end, it would be worth your time to read this book. At only 137 pages of content, it won't eat a hugh amount of time, and I think you'll find that your info/time to read ratio will compare favorably to many many other books.

I remember when I first started using the Internet. Dial ups were extremely slow at the time, so I'd type in a URL, then go make a sandwich. By the time I came back, hopefully the page would be loaded.

Today, we expect more. Often if a page takes more than a few moments to load, I don't bother. I tend to equate professional with quick. If a site doesn't load quickly or if parts of the page are slow, I naturally assume that the information provided might be as shabbily compiled. I simply move onto a different page.

High Performance Web Sites looks at how we can make our own websites load more quickly. I was surprised at how many different little things that can be done beyond optimizing graphics. Most of these things only take a few little nips and tucks and none were beyond my novice level of ability.

So this book is definitely a must-read for any front end folk. It shows how to make sites trim, slick and usable using some simple, sometimes common sense approaches that manage to elude the best of us before we read the book. Not only that, it provides a hierarchy of proven, scientific (maybe not in the traditional sense but certainly field-tested) hard evidence showing why the tricks are in the order they are.

This book and YSlow can definitely help make any site feel more responsive, and maybe shave dollars off bandwidth bills!

This book brings 2 kinds of tricks: the ones that are right under your nose and you never think about it and ones that you possible never would hear about unless you read this book.

This book was very helpful. Applying this rules I made my website about to 90% faster than before.

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!

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.

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).

While not all tips will apply to everyone, this is a great list of short, actionable items to increase the performance of your web site.

Steve's book fills an important void in the Web industry of assembling and codifying the best-practices for improving front-end performance. He writes in a very matter-of-fact style and provides lots of illustrative examples.

If you're tired of wading through RFCs and specs trying to figure out how things are *supposed* to work vs. how they *really* work, this book really adds value.

The last chapter, which evaluates the performance of top Web sites against the best-practices, provides real-world examples of what works (and in many cases, what doesn't).

I find myself referring to this book often. It should be on the shelf of every serious Web developer and system administrator.

I found this book to be very useful and practical. It details how frontend design has a tremendous impact on the performance of a website. The book does an excellent job of showing that reducing http request through design can benefit performance. The author establishes that 80-90 percent of a typical page's download time is spent downloading the components of a page, while the rest is spent actually downloading the html source. By using the 14 provided guidelines, improvements in the responsiveness of an application can be achieved. I found this book to be very rewarding. It is a quick read (less than 150 pages) but packed with useful information. With this said, the text should be considered a jumping off point to further interest in these areas. I did feel as though some of the concepts were easier explained than implemented. For instance the manageability of customized script configurations for a large scale website seems troublesome. Others made perfect sense and would only be foolishly ignored. Overall I really enjoyed this good and would recommend it to anyone looking to build more responsive web applications or just faster loading webpage.

This book, subtitled "Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers," is a useful guide for every web developer, particularly those involved with large-scale web sites. Author Steve Souders has organized his recommendations into 14 rules to speed the display of a web page. He points out that at least 80 percent of the time it takes to display a web page happens after the HTML document has been downloaded. This additional time is taken up by loading scripts, stylesheets, images, redirects, flash,and lesser-used elements. He demonstrates the value of his rules by citing before and after web addresses in the text. The differences are dramatic. In the last chapter, he deconstructs (analyzes) 10 top web sites, rates them, and shows how they can be speeded up. Among the slowest pages to load are CNN at 22.4 sec, and Amazon at 15.9 sec. Compare these with Google--one of the fastest--and you will see the difference immediately. If you work at web site development, get this book.

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.