New Book: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers
Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 8:31PM 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 his new book Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers
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.
About the Author
Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains 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. He is also co-chair of Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O'Reilly. 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!.
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Reader Comments (7)
The book is finally shipping. The new release has already got a five star review:
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!
The blog of Steve Souders explains some of these techniques and covers news about high performance web sites:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/
Steve Souders of Google has presented on the Velocity 2009 conference. His presentations:
http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/public/schedule/detail/10179">State of Performance
Why is the Web so slow? Steve Souders talks about the issues that prevent web sites from being faster, and what we should expect to see to address these problems.
http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/public/schedule/detail/8807">Website Performance Analysis
In this workshop, Steve Souders explains the rules he developed as part of YSlow, as well as new best practices he’s developed while at Google. With those in mind, he analyzes several of today’s popular websites to see how well they follow, or don’t follow, this advice. As part of this analysis attendees will learn how to use tools like Firebug, YSlow, HttpWatch, Hammerhead, Cuzillion, and Smush.it.
Other interesting presentations from Velocity 2009 are available http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/public/schedule/proceedings">here. They include:
Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site by John Adams
Frontend Performance Engineering in Facebook by David Wei and Changhao Jiang
Introduction to Managed Infrastructure with Puppet
Which book shall I buy on high performance web sites? High performance web sites or Even faster web sites? I want to start with one book only. Maybe I will buy the other later.
Hi Charles,
I highly recommend both books but start with the first one. "High Performance Web Sites" discusses performance tuning techniques that are all relatively straightforward to implement. The new book covers some advanced topics. One theme that runs throughout the new book is asynchronous techniques. Get "Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers" if you use or plan to use technologies listed in the Table of Contents:
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.
What performance tools are covered in the Appendix of the book?
Performance Tools for even faster web sites:
* YSlow - performance analysis tool (steve created version 1.0), Firefox plugin
* Page Speed - performance analysis tool, Firefox plugin
* Sprite Generator - tool for creating CSS sprite images
* HttpWatch - packet sniffer
* Firebug - web development tool, Firefox
* smush.it! - image optimization tool