High Performance Web Sites, Reviewed by Stephen Clay
Dec
19
Stephen Clay, a web manager for UF IFAS, recently borrowed a copy of “High Performance Web Sites” from our Web Administration bookshelf and was gracious enough to provide an overview for us.
High Performance Web Sites lays the foundation for making web pages zip in your browser, and it turns out this has little to do with expensive hardware upgrades or server code rewrites. This quick book uncovers what really slows down pages with a peek into the gears of things we use every day: the browser, the HTTP protocol, and the caching mechanisms in both. Rather than bog us down with specs, Steve Souders lays out simple rules that let us take advantage of these findings immediately, and changes the way we think about web performance.
Sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Netflix are already following Souders’ lead, but these practices are accessible to all UF web workers. There’s already a wealth of free tools and guides to help us follow the rules and find where we’re not. YSlow for Firefox is one. My pet project, Minify, is another; it serves your Javascript and CSS in ways that automatically follow several of Souders’ guidelines. This book, Souders’ video presentations, and the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance site are all great places to dig into the topic.
So, if you’re interested in giving your sites a performance boost, borrow our copy of “High Performance Web Sites”. Thanks, Steve!
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