Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

By: 
Steve Souders
Published: 
2010
Pages: 
256
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Book 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.

Member Reviews: 

Review By: Chris A. Grady
03/03/2011I really enjoyed "Even Faster Web Sites" by Steve Souders. The content is engaging and very interesting. The web can be slow, and the suggestions Souders discusses in this book and his previous text are invaluable for web development. He presents the reader with ideas to optimize loading of web pages, which can greatly enhance the user experience.

As I read through this book, I imagined myself in a web development workshop comprising three separate subjects—Javascript, network performance, and web browser performance—further broken down into smaller components. Each chapter was as if I was being taught the subject matter at a very high level—easy to understand, and just technical enough not to lose credibility.

Souders and the other authors noted in the various chapters present the subjects in a non-boring fashion and offer examples that could be easily incorporated into current coding practices. The chapters contain coding examples as well as illustrations to further explain the subject matter. The text is well organized, and most chapters end with a high-level summary discussing the main points.

Souders could have developed all the subjects a bit more, but then the question becomes how much is too much information when you want to speed up web sites? The notion of less is more prevails with this text.

After reading the book, I did another quick scan of the subject headings. This made me question its longevity, since coding languages are ever developing and changing daily. I am not really sure how relevant this will be in a year from now. However, I really like that the author includes a number of popular browsers when presenting examples rather than focusing exclusively on just one browser.

I recommend this book mainly for experienced and novice web developers, as they may be enlightened by the simple ideas suggested to cut time off the page load. I don't know what value a QA individual would receive from the information, other than to have a higher understanding of why the page coding was arranged one way or another.

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