When conversation turns to performance, we often focus on the database, application servers, or a multitude of other backend processes, and completely forget about the front-end: CSS, JavaScript, filesizes, conditional requests, and request pipelining. In this book, Steve Souders documents the best practices for optimizing your front-end experience, which can often yield significant improvements with minimal code changes.

The detailed examples and associated discussions yield a lot of very useful tips - you'll definitely want to have this book near you. Likewise, the examples of dissecting the 10 most popular websites at the end of the book are very helpful, as they highlight the method, and also show how these practices have been adopted by different organizations.

Only word of forewarning: if you've read the YSlow documentation, then you won't find all that much new content in this book. Corollary: you can read the YSlow documentation to get many of the same tips and best practices, for free.

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 the HTML document has been downloaded, and describes the importance of the techniques in this book.

The book is a quick read containing some good hints and tips. Many are fairly easily investigated and implemented in most companies.

Seemingly out of place, however, is Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. While it's certainly a good way to improve performance, it's not something every company can afford.

Overall, an interesting book.

When optimizing a website, a lot of focus is usually placed on the back-end (databases, server-side code, etc.). That's because most programmers are comfortable with such matters. Once the HTML is emitted, it's easy to think "not my problem".

This book, however, is written by someone (a Yahoo engineer) who knows the front end (how the emitted HTML performs for the user) *is* often the biggest problem.

Instead of vague generalities, you'll find precise prescriptions (14, in fact) that when applied will make your site faster. The prescriptions are well-supported with both the *reasons* as well as examples of live URLs with and without the rules applied.

This book should be required reading for your whole engineering team. If you ran a series of brown-bag lunches and applied 1 rule per week, at the end of a calendar quarter you'd have a much snappier web site.

Very good. Helps bring a concise level of good practices to any developer's toolbox.

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.

I am new to the web site design world and have purchased a number of books that give good advise about designing for SEO and good navigation of a site. Still I wondered why some sites never seemed to load quickly. This book is a brief guide to many of the things to avoid when designing a site. Poor web site performance is not just http trips. The number of really bad web sites is amazing and this book may help front-end engineers point the way for the back-end designers too.

Everyone prefers faster websites. Following the steps in this short book will measurably improve your site's performance with a minimum of effort.

If you're running a small site, the simple steps in this book might take you an afternoon to implement, and speed your site's performance by 25% or more.

For a major site, implementing the best practices might take you a few days, and save you thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth. Following the guidance that Steve lays out in this book has saved my company over $10,000 a month in bandwidth bills alone, and visitor satisfaction soared along with the site performance.

Highly recommended.

the book felt a little outdated, while the information in the book is very valuable I already knew a large portion of it, so if you are already an experienced web developer then don't expect much of this book, there is a newer version of the book called even faster websites I'm looking forward to get.

This book is packed with details. The performance he suggests is more than enough to speed up your website. If you keep optimizing your site based on what the book says, you will actually learn more and discover new things that you never knew.

Highly recommended.

For once, it's nice to have an dev book not full of useless screenshots and blatitudes going beyond 500 pages. This little gem is a delightful stroll through a field I see ignored in most projects too often.

While the authors does not say everthing there is to say about web site optimization, the advice here will be more than enough to out do competitors, to set you a level or two above fellow developers and to show some light on issues that you will probably never find out for yourself unless you do a lot of testing, which you never have time to do, considering the strict deadlines imposed on most projects. Fortunately, Steve Souders has already done this for us.

I love the concept of just doing 14 chapters, each for a given solution, explanining it concisely, giving real world metrics and sticking to the point. Good also that he shows how he did the tests and how he analysis top web sites.

To sum it up, I think this should be a must not only for the front-end engineers, as the book suggests, but also for any developer having to do with the web (asp.net, php, whatever) and architects, project leads, whatever. The book is short and plain, so you have no excuse. It will benefit you no matter what.

Si vous développez sur le web, achetez vite ce livre !

Pourquoi ?...

D'abord pour son auteur Steve Souders, qui après avoir été responsable chez Yahoo! de la performance des sites, il vient tout juste (7 janvier 08) de débuter chez un autre géant : Google. Steve est à l'origine de YSlow un outil (pour Firefox) d'analyse de performance des pages web.

Ensuite, cet ouvrage (sur le modèle de YSlow), vous propose des recommandations sur 13 points pour optimiser le chargement des pages web.

Bien évidemment, l'avantage à tirer de ces recommandations dépend du trafic du ou des sites que vous gérez. Mais, si vous êtes curieux et que vous vous intéressez au web, allez-y sans hésiter.

L'ouvrage est facile à lire, mais est surtout utile comme ouvrage de référence à garder sous la main en permanence.

If you are into front-end development, then this book is a good resource. This book explains how to improve your site performance (loading time) significantly. I bought this book back in 2009 and learned a lot from it. Although if you use framework, most of these optimization can be done from the framework, but I still think this book is a good read if you are into front-end development.

Also, all of the points covered in the book is mentioned in Yahoo Developer Network's Performance blog.[...]

There's also a youtube video titled "High Performance Websites and YSlow!" which explains these points in details.

Das Buch beschreibt viele Eigenschaften, auf die es bei der Webperformance ankommt. Z.B. wo müssen javascript Dateien geladen werden? Am Anfang oder am Ende eines Html Dokuments? oder ähnliches... Ein tolles Basisbuch für Webentwickler.