High Performance Web Sites

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

I got this book in the mail the other day. I never ordered it, so figured it was a birthday gift from O'Reilly. But I still felt obligated to flip through it and write this little review... not much of a "review", maybe "comment"...

After 11 months of Flex development, the concepts of how to streamline your frontend are starting to fade from my mind. The object for me now is to decrease my SWF's file size, make sure there aren't memory leaks, and make fewer database hits. High Performance Web Sites boils down to the list of concepts on the back cover of the book. Things like "Make few HTTP requests" and "Make JavaScript and CSS external". The studies done on popular websites is interesting, to see just why the site is slow. But maybe I like it because my two most hated sites scored terribly. MSN got an F and MySpace got a D.

To test out and grade your own site, first get Firebug, then YSlow from http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/