Tag: book

So I decided to do a little book shopping a few weeks ago and one thing I purchased was High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (affiliate link). At its core is essentially a 14 step guide to making faster websites. I don’t think any of the steps are new or innovative, so anyone looking for something groundbreaking will be sorely disappointed. I don’t think the target audience has that expectation though. It’s still a rather practical book for any developer who spends a lot of time on the front-end of things.

It gives many great examples on how to implement, as well as suggestions based on what some of the biggest sites on the web are doing (including Yahoo, the authors employer). I found it pretty helpful because it saves hours worth of research on what other sites are doing to improve their performance. For that reason alone it’s a worthwhile book to checkout. For each rule there’s enough discussion to help you decide if you can implement an improvement on your own site or not. Most sites are limited by their legacy systems such as cms, processes (including human) and audience in what they can actually do. Unless you’ve got a serious budget, you likely fail rule #2 (use a CDN) right off the bat. Regardless there’s likely a few tips you can take advantage of. It’s also a very fast book to get through.

Most steps are pretty quick to implement provided they are feasible in your situation. Overall one of the best “make it better” tech books I’ve seen regarding web development. One of the few that actually appeared worth purchasing (and I did). The majority of the tips require a somewhat tech savvy approach to web development, the book isn’t oriented much towards web designers (with the notable exception of reducing the # of requests by using CSS and better use of images) or casual webmasters. It’s important for those who understand the importance of HTTP headers, but could use some help deciding on best practices, and those who want to know how the small things can add up.

Interestingly enough, I learned about the book by trying the YSlow extension which essentially evaluates a page against the rules suggested in the book. Interesting from a marketing perspective I guess. Overall this blog evaluates ok (about as well as it ever will considering I’m not putting it on a CDN anytime soon). Though I guess I could add some expires headers in a few places.