This is a review of “High Performance Web Sites” by Steve Souders
First off this book is written by someone who knows just a tad about front end client web interfaces and their performance, being the performance chief at Yahoo he has quite a bit of experience under his belt. Myself having done a fair amount of Javascript learned quite a bit by reading this book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is responsible for creating fast loading client web interfaces built with HTML and Javascript.
Some of the tips will be very familiar to folks out there such as minifying Javascript libraries, using a CDN and tinkering with your server’s expires headers, however some of the other tips are a bit less well known, such as putting JS library calls at the bottom of your page… why? Because all other resources, except JS files are downloaded in parallel, however a JS download by itself and nothing else will continue downloading until it is finished. The author does a great job of explaining several very helpful “under the hood” performance issues with browsers that you may have otherwise not known about. Get this book as it is a short read with a big bang for the buck.
Recommended? YES
Skill Level – Beginner to Advanced, however the advanced folks will get more out of the low-level HTTP and browser performance issues than beginners.
