High Performance Web Sites and over 670,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
More Buying Choices
42 used & new from $12.87
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
or
Get a $4.76 Amazon.com Gift Card
High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book
Start reading High Performance Web Sites on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

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

Steve Souders (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
List Price: $29.99
Price: $19.79 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $10.20 (34%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it delivered Friday, September 10? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
26 new from $15.25 16 used from $12.87
Textbook StudentJoin Amazon Student and get FREE Two-Day Shipping for one year with Amazon Prime shipping benefits.

Formats

 Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition $14.39   -- --
Paperback $19.79   $15.25 $12.87
Sell This Book Back for $4.76
Whether you buy it used on Amazon for $12.87 or somewhere else, you can sell it back to our Textbook Buyback Store at the current price of $4.76. Restrictions Apply
Used Price$12.87
Buyback Price$4.76
Price after
Buyback$8.11

Frequently Bought Together

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers + Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers + Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications
Price For All Three: $69.27

Show availability and shipping details

Buy the selected items together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

by Steve Souders
4.8 out of 5 stars (12)  $23.09
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

by Cal Henderson
4.4 out of 5 stars (32)  $26.39
High Performance JavaScript (Build Faster Web Application Interfaces)

High Performance JavaScript (Build Faster Web Application Interfaces)

by Nicholas C. Zakas
4.3 out of 5 stars (11)  $23.09
Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets

Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets

by Andrew B. King
4.9 out of 5 stars (15)  $26.39
Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors

Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors

by Alistair Croll
5.0 out of 5 stars (5)  $31.49
› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

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

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: 176 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 11, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596529309
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596529307
  • Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.8 x 0.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #121,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
    #5 in  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Performance Optimization

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

More About the Author

Steve Souders
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Steve Souders Page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
put stylesheets, primed cache, subsequent page views, frontend engineer, end user response time, parallel downloads, unstyled content, combining scripts, using external files, duplicate scripts, blank white screen, image image image image, one stylesheet, page weight, progressive rendering, top web sites, inline scripts, external stylesheet, page load time, origin server, reuse rate, gzip compression, inline images, script image, trailing slash
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Internet Explorer, Top Sites, Dojo Compressor, Make Fewer, Avoid Redirects, Jesse James Garrett, Put Scripts, Performance Research, Flash of Unstyled Content, Microsoft Windows, The Savings, Gzip Components, Revving Filenames, Tenni Theurer, Google Toolbar, Make Ajax Cacheable, Page Detailer, Real World, Empty Cache
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
66% buy the item featured on this page:
High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers by Steve Souders Paperback 4.3 out of 5 stars (44)
$19.79
Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers
14% buy
Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers by Steve Souders Paperback 4.8 out of 5 stars (12)
$23.09
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications
9% buy
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications by Cal Henderson Paperback 4.4 out of 5 stars (32)
$26.39
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More
6% buy
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More by Baron Schwartz Paperback 4.6 out of 5 stars (23)
$31.49
› Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(30)
(29)
(26)
(19)
(11)
(10)
(9)
(8)
(5)
(5)
Agree with these tags?
See all 44 tags...

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

44 Reviews
5 star:
 (27)
4 star:
 (9)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:
 (4)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (44 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fast Read -- Pass It Along, September 17, 2007
By Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (Paperback)
§
_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.
§
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


 
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Good ideas, poor book, December 22, 2007
By E. Welker (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (Paperback)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


 
32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars I expected more..., January 10, 2008
By NJP (Ohio) (Cincinnati) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (Paperback)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars lacks content
The book lacks content. Fortunately the author arranges the book from most important first, to least important last. I am at page 30 and am struggling to stay awake. Read more
Published 4 months ago by charles

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, worth it
Everyone that is involved with creating or maintaining websites should read this book. Contained within the pages are important concepts everyone should be aware of, from... Read more
Published 4 months ago by J. Fox

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy cheap tricks to improving your site
In this book Souders presents 14 rules that will cut the response time of a site by up to 50%. Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo! Read more
Published 5 months ago by Patrick

2.0 out of 5 stars Poses problems but few solutions and/or tools
Really thought this would help. He seems to have a good handle on the rules. But the solutions and tools area is lacking. Plus there is little if any emphasis on IIS.
Published 6 months ago by mind dump

5.0 out of 5 stars If you work on the web, and haven't read this, you're doing it wrong
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... Read more
Published 8 months ago by E. Caron

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for every web developer
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.
Published 9 months ago by Tal Moshaiov

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Checklist For The Web Developer
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... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Joseph S. Strazzere

3.0 out of 5 stars Not really what I was expecting
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. Read more
Published 16 months ago by David Arthur

4.0 out of 5 stars Expensive, thin book with great ideas only a few of whch can be implemented by non-IT people
There can be little dispute that the information contained in this very thin volume is of great value to anyone interested in website optimization. Read more
Published 17 months ago by M. Erb

5.0 out of 5 stars The dictionary of Web Site Performance
This book is like the dictionary of Web Site Performance. This is a great book to have on your shelf and pull out as a reference. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Mark Ruzomberka

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   


Look for Similar Items by Category

Look for Similar Items by Subject

Search Books by subject:





















i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...
 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.