Title: Even Faster Web Sites, a book by Steve Souders
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: July 29, 2009

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# Even Faster Web Sites, a book by Steve Souders

July 29, 2009

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[Steve Souders](http://stevesouders.com/) has recently released something like a
sequel to his previous book “High Performance Web Sites” (HPWS) which [I have already reviewed earlier](https://alex.kirk.at/2007/09/26/high-performance-web-sites/?output_format=md).
With [Even Faster Web Sites](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522308/) he and
his co-authors (specialists in their fields, such as [Doug Crockford](http://www.crockford.com/)(
[JavaScript: The Good Parts](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/)) on Javascript)
elaborate on some of the rules Steve postulated in HPWS.

It needs to be stated first that if you **haven’t read** and followed **Steve’s 
first book**, you should **go and do that first**. It’s a must-read that makes it
pretty easy to understand why your page might be slow and how to improve it.

In “Even Faster Web Sites”, Steve and his co-authors walk a **fine line between 
fast and maintainable code**. While most techniques described in his first book 
could be integrated with an intelligent deployment process, it is much harder with“
Even Faster Web Sites”.

In the chapters that Steve wrote himself for “Even Faster Web Sites,” he is pretty
much obsessed with analyzing when, in what sequence, and how parallel the parts 
of a web page are loaded. Being able to have **resources transfered in parallel**
lead to the **highest gains** in page loading speed. The enemy of the parallel download
is the script tag, so Steve spends (like in HPWS but in greater detail in this book)
quite a few pages analyzing which technique of embedding external scripts lead to
which sequence in loading the resources of the page.

Steve also covers interesting techniques such as ways to split the initial payload
of a web site (lazy loading) and also **chunked HTTP responses** into consideration
that allow sending back HTTP responses even before the script has finished. Downgrading
to HTTP/1.0 can only be considered as hard-core technique that just huge sites such
as Wikipedia are using right now and should be considered being covered for educational
reasons only.

There is a section focussing on Optimizing Images which **thankfully takes the deployment
process into consideration** and shows how to automate the techniques they suggest
to optimize the images.

My only real disappointment with “Even Faster Web Sites” is the section by Nicolas
C. Zakas. He writes about how to Write Efficient JavaScript but fails to prove it.
To be fair: in the first section of the chapter he shows benchmarks and draws conclusions
that I can confirm in the real world (accessing properties of objects and their 
child-objects can be expensive). But then he gives advice for writing code that 
can hardly be called maintainable (e.g. re-ordering and nesting if-statements (!),
re-writing loops as repeated statements (!!!)) and then doesn’t even prove that 
this makes the code any faster. I suspect that the gains of these micro-optimizations
are negligible, so chapters like these should be (if at all) included in an appendix.

Speaking of appendices, I love what Steve has put in here: he shows a **selection
of the finest performance tools** that can be found in the field.

This book can help you make your site dangerously fast. You also need to be dangerously
careful what tips you follow and how you try to keep your site maintainable at the
same time. “Even Faster Web Sites” is **great for people who can’t get enough of
site optimization** and therefore **a worthy sequel** to “High Performance Web Sites,”
but just make sure that you also read and follow Steve’s first book first.

The book has been published by [O’Reilly](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522308/)
in June 2009, ISBN [9780596522308](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522308/).

[Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/)

Read this next

[Debugging PHP on Mac OS X](https://alex.kirk.at/2008/12/26/debugging-php-on-mac-os-x/)

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