Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers (Paperback)

~ (Author), Souders Steve (Author), Tim O'Reilly (Creator)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

About the Author

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with more than 1 million downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference sponsored by O'Reilly. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and he frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (June 18, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596522304
• ISBN-13: 978-0596522308
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #11,896 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Raising the performance bar up a notch, June 16, 2009

By	Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This book is a follow-on to Steve Souder's first book entitled "High Performance Web Sites". Whereas the first book was authored entirely by Steve Souder, this newer book contains chapters authored by other experts in Javascript, Ajax, and/or Network Performance. Comparatively speaking, I tend to think of the performance tuning techniques discussed in the first book as all relatively straightforward to implement, while those in this newer book as ranging from some that are relatively straightforward to implement (e.g., how to write efficient Javascript and CSS Selector code, how to optimize image sizes, and how to flush documents early to trigger initial web page rendering as soon as possible), to others that tend to be trickier to implement, involving either the use of:

* lesser known http features (e.g., chunked encoding for incremental page rendering or low-latency data transfers from server to browser in support of near-realtime applications such as chat, stock quotes, etc), or

* still evolving technologies (e.g., Google GEAR or Web Worker API for overcoming Javascript's single-threadedness to get more concurrent work done), or

* not yet publicly released technologies (e.g., Microsoft Research's Doloto system that facilitates the "splitting and packaging" of a Javascript-intensive Web Application into a quick-loading initial component or cluster that enables early page rendering, and supporting payloads that are loaded more lazily or on-demand).

One theme that runs throughout this newer book is that in order to squeeze more performance out of a next generation web application, developers would have to become more and more adept with using asynchronous techniques (which could involve tricky issues); by this I don't just mean using Ajax which could involve asynchronously pulling data from server to browser, but also asynchronous techniques for facilitating parallel component downloads, etc.

Given the cutting-edge and more complex nature of some of the discussed techniques, this book is an invaluable aid to anyone itching to experiment: it lays out a problem, suggests approaches and related tools whenever appropriate (e.g., no access to Doloto?, here are alternative do-it-yourself implementation approaches), provides lots of sample code, calls out potential gotchas and how to workaround them, and then with the support of empirical data, tells you the relative pros and cons of each suggested approach. Highly recommended!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Table of Contents, June 22, 2009

By	Douglas Crockford - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Chapter 1. Understanding Ajax Performance, Douglas Crockford.
Chapter 2. Creating Responsive Web Applications, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer.
Chapter 3. Splitting the Initial Payload.
Chapter 4. Loading Scripts Without Blocking.
Chapter 5. Coupling Asynchronous Scripts.
Chapter 6. Positioning Inline Scripts.
Chapter 7. Writing Efficient JavaScript, Nicholas C. Zakas.
Chapter 8. Scaling with Comet, Dylan Schiemann.
Chapter 9. Going Beyond Gzipping, Tony Gentilcore.
Chapter 10. Optimizing Images, Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan.
Chapter 11. Sharding Dominant Domains.
Chapter 12. Flushing the Document Early.
Chapter 13. Using Iframes Sparingly.
Chapter 14. Simplifying CSS Selectors.
Appendix. Performance Tools.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faster Web Pages, It Does Matter, June 29, 2009

By	D. Vinge - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've produced Web sites for 15 years. In the "old days" it was routine to test new Web pages on a dial-up connection. Today few developers have access to dial-up for testing. Yes you can load test and calculate the time to render a page on different connections but you'll miss the look in the developers eyes while he stares at the screen waiting for a page to render. It's a good way to be sure that developers experience their work from the customers point-of-view, all customers.

So the next time you're told by a developer, "oh it doesn't matter, everyone has broadband" take away their broadband for a week and make them read this book while waiting for their pages to load.

This book provides practical instruction on how to optimize your code for a better user experience, on broadband or not. This is written for developers but is also useful information for business managers who can demand faster performance from their Web sites and their developers.