Message from Dean - May 8th 2007

I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529307
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596529309
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 168
Publication Date: September 11, 2007
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
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




Rating: - A must-read book for every web developer
Every few often there comes a book that's so impactful that it influences the rest of your career; this is one of them. It was especially revealing to learn that front-end engineering is where the biggest bang for the buck is in terms of optimizing your site.

It's great how this book is in distilling the best optimizations to do for a website into 14 simple rules, that doesn't take up hundreds of pages; it really speaks volumes to the author's writing ability.

It's also an added bonus that the author provides the free tool YSlow to help analyzing your website. Overall I'm really glad I read this book :).

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Rating: - Great book on web site performance
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) ... Read More

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Rating: - High Performance Web Sites
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.

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Rating: - Great Content, but not much unique in book-to-Web comparison
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!

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Rating: - It works! After this lecture my site becomes 90% faster
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.

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