Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

At just over 125 pages, this book is short and definitely sweet.

The subtitle is, "Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers."

As the book front says, there are 14 Steps to Faster-Loading

Websites that are covered. It's very difficult to find any fluff at all.

The techniques are covered in priority order, those that produce the best

results first. Not all techniques will apply to all websites, but many

will. Also, many well known sites are compared for how well they

implement (or not) these techniques.

Each technique is backed by enough background to let you

understand why they work, and URLs are provided to allow you to experience

and test the concepts without having to do too much work.

I particularly enjoyed the author's note, on several occasions,

that a lot of things were either difficult or impossible with Internet

Explorer. Even though it remains the most popular browser, one has to ask

why? But I'll get off my soapbox.

I found this to be an excellent book. I'm able to apply what I've

learned to a variety of websites I have access to or tinker with, and I'm

not a webmaster.

http://elug.ca/reviews/high_performance_web_sites.shtml

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders is one of the most important books front end engineers should read to be able to develop a proper web sites. In 14 chapter, you will know 14 of the best tips to enhance the performance of your website. The good thing in this book, it is quick read and specific, the author gives example by numbers and statistics about the top 10 websites on the internet. In each tip Steve tells the effect of applying this tip on the top 10 websites.



In this book, you will learn some great tips in web development like (Minimizing the number of Http Requests sent to the server, improve the caching in your site, compressing the content to save time and resources, best location for scripts and styles and other interesting tips)



I highly recommend any engineer working in the front end tier to read this book and apply the tips inside on the web pages.



Ahmed Hashim (http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ahashim/) , EGJUG (http://www.egjug.org) Leader, Software Engineer, Etisalat (http://www.etisalat.com.eg)

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

If you are looking to speedup your website _ start here.

This easy read covers 14 front-end performance tips. Not all may be applicable. Any tips implemented resulting in improving your user's experience, be it a high-traffic website or a corporate intranet, is worth the cost of the book.

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

One of the most noticeable and least expensive improvements you can make to increase the speed of your website is to implement these front-end techniques.

It is true that, the 14 principles can be found in the description of the book, or with the excellent YSlow tool delivered by Yahoo! Developer Network.

So why should you buy the book??

The book explains "why" these 14 principles are best, and it does so in a concise format.

If you currently work professionally with the front-end side of a website (or would like to someday) this book should be considered a required read. At less than US$30, it is an inexpensive and practical investment into your on-going education.

Don't settle with just knowing "how" to make your site faster, get the book and learn "why" these steps make your site faster. You'll be a better and more valuable developer for it.

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

I was very pleased with this book, having spent many hours trying to find this sort of information in an understandable and comprehensive format on the web. The book is everything I'd hoped it would be, and my website now runs much faster as a result.

However, after buying the book (and paying for shipping to NZ, which is around the same cost as the book itself) I was not that thrilled to suddenly find "articles" popping up all over the internet basically quoting the entire book verbatim. Save your hard-earned cash and just google it.

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

This book is extremely well organized and easy to read. It is code-oriented; server and database tuning are not addressed though some general ideas are discussed in passing.

Narrative explanations are combined with real world examples and code samples to illustrate each of the fourteen "rules" for tuning a web site. He clearly explains the pros and cons of each option, and why some techniques are better than others. He provides a primary recommendation but also discusses other options at length. This book is scalable to help developers of small-business web sites up to enterprise e-commerce sites.

Many of the "rules" are not necessarily a surprise to anyone with much web development experience. However the speed comparison charts and illustrations are extremely helpful, and many helpful "gold nuggets" of information are also sprinkled throughout.

After a full read, this book is now on my shelf within easy reach so that I can refer to the invaluable tips and code samples. I highly recommend that any serious web developer add this book to their bookshelf!

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

This book is an excellent guide for web developers looking to write optimized HTML. The book is organized into 14 categories of performance enhancements with a chapter decicated to each category. There is also a chapter on techniques in use by top websites, a chapter on HTTP as it applies to performace, and a chapter on the "Golden Rule" of web page preformance (Most time is not spend downloading the main page).

With each of the performance category chapters is a break down of the tips and tricks that allow browsers to load, fetch and/or render pages faster. Some rules (such as using a content delivery network) would apply to large or enterprize sites but the majority of the hints can be used on any web page down to the smallest home page.

The book is well organized and easy to use. The font and page size are good for reading while sitting at a computer. The reference section which gives links to examples for each tip in the book is outstanding. It is broken down by chapter, then by tip within chapters.

The presentation is form the point of view of performance so there was material on how the browser works internally as well as explanations of external browser behavior.

Overall, this is a very nice guide of web site performance ideas.

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

I really enjoyed reading High Performance Web Sites.

After beginning with the performance golden rule and a brief introduction http the book devotes a chapter to each of the fourteen optimization rules that the author has developed while working at Yahoo!. The rules are presented in order of importance. The final chapter analyzes some high profile web sites to see how they stack up.

This book taught me a lot about how to optimize the loading of the web sites I write. Books like this are ones that I devour quickly and then want to share with others so they can befit. The small size of this book goes hand in hand with this desire. Since it is such a quick read coworkers are more likely to be willing to read it and less likely to put it off.

The explanations of each rule give you a clear understanding of the "whys" and not just the "hows". Most of the rules are illustrated with examples hosted on the authors web site (http://stevesouders.com/hpws/). You'll want to have had some experience developing web sites to gain the most from this book.

If you are in need of speeding up a web page, but don't know where to start I'd recommend this book. It is filled with practical first-hand knowledge and insight. Who knows, you may want to loan it out to a friend or two when you are finished. I know I do.

Comments about oreilly High Performance Web Sites:

I stumbled upon this from an article in the Yahoo! User Interface Blog and found the information to be great! While I'd experimented with many of the techniques found in these pages, I found quite a few other helpful hints and lots of great information about each technique. The information in this book will greatly improve the responsiveness of my current development efforts. Thanks! I can't wait until it's completed.