"Want to speed up your web site? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process. Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to:Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Use a Content Delivery Network
Add an Expires Header
Gzip Components
Put Stylesheets at the Top
Put Scripts at the Bottom
Avoid CSS Expressions
Make JavaScript and CSS External
Reduce DNS Lookups
Minify JavaScript
Avoid Redirects
Remove Duplicates Scripts
Configure ETags
Make Ajax Cacheable

If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.

About the Author
Steve Souders holds down the job of Chief Performance Yahoo! at Yahoo! He's been at Yahoo! since 2000, working on many of the platforms and products within the company He ran the development team for My Yahoo! before reaching his current position. As Chief Performance Yahoo!, he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams. Prior to Yahoo!, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups, including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 1980s Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning. He received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Steve's interests are varied. He sits on the board of Freehand Systems and Fremont Hills Country Club, and teaches Sunday School. He's played basketball with several NBA and WNBA players, but has recently retired and switched to Ultimate Frisbee. He was a member of the Universal Studios Internet Task Force, has rebuilt a 90-year-old carriage house, and participated in setting a Guinness world record. He has a wonderful wife and three daughters."

To be updated