Stoyan has a good blog post today as part of his Performance Advent series about required reading for web developers. He covered some great books. All three of the three books that have been published are currently sitting on my bookshelf and you should buy them immediately if you don’t already own them. I thought I’d share a few more books that I have read that contain more web performance tips and tricks that I have not seen in the books he recommended. Some of helpful some are not. Having written a book myself on Ajax Security I know exactly how difficult it is to create a meaningful and lasting book of substance. All of these authors deserve respect, even if the book no longer is beneficial today. For each of these 4 books I have included my overview and opinion of the book, the key performance tips and ideas it contains, and my recommendation.
Web Caching. By Duane Wessels (O’Reilly, 2001)
Duane Wessels is the perfect choice to write what is the definitive guide to web caching as he is the creator of the Squid Caching Proxy. While this book is targeted more at IT operational folks (specifically people who install, configure, monitor, and maintain web proxies) it provides excellent background into how caching proxies work and are deployed and what they will and will not cache. It also has, without a doubt, the best explanation about Cache-Control directives I have ever read. It explains what the directives mean, how they interact with each other, and how caching proxies and the browser cache act on those directives. Think you know what “no-cache” does? You are wrong.
Key Performance Information
This book has tidbits here and there that will help front-end performance such as: Using Cache-Control correctly. Adding support for stale resources. What will proxies not cache even if it’s allowed (URL’s with query strings, CGI-bin directories, etc). When is caching used but pointless (varying on cookies, host, etc). How can you improve your hit/miss ratio.
Verdict
BUY! Good background, worth the cost of the book for the exhaustive explanation of caching directives alone. A dozen or so front-end performance tidbits scattered throughout. Find a cheap used copy.
JavaScript: The Good Parts. By Douglas Crockford (O’Reilly 2008)
Written by JSON creator Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts provides a detailed analysis of JavaScript as a programming language and explorers what features of the language aid and what features hinder the creation of beautiful code and why. While targeted at JavaScript developers Chapter 10 and Appendixes A, B, and C provide a wealth of performance advice.
Key Performance Information
Half a dozen JavaScript performance tips mixed in throughout such as: Controlling scope chains of variables, dynamic compilation of code at runtime, avoiding type coercion, loop construction, regular expression performance.
Verdict
BUY! Will open your eyes about the elegance of JavaScript. If you like computer science and algorithms you will love this book. If you are only interested in the performance tips you’ll be disappointed if you pay full price for such a small book. Buy it used in that case.
Web Performance Tuning. By Patrick Killelea (O’Reilly 2002)
Originally written in 1998 the 2nd edition with seemingly minimal updating was released in 2002. I really wanted to like this book. It is well written with tons of data tables, charts, and graphs. Unfortunately nearly the entirety of the book serves better as a reference manual and contains little and poorly actionable performance advice for web developers. For example, the chapter on “Security” is about SSL. (I will punch the next person in the face who equates web security with SSL and firewalls). This chapter contains some nice graphs of the performance of an obsolete Netscape web server. After all of that the “advice” is to “consider buying an SSL accelerator card.” What about performance of different algorithms? Or how to optimize SSL negotiation? Or the importance of keeping SSL connections open? Nothing (though I’ll be writing a blog post about optimizing SSL performance soon). The book also contains very outdated filler chapters such as choosing a modem, choosing a client and server OS, choosing client and server hardware, and an overview of non-HTTP network protocols.
That is not to say this is a bad book. There are some very enjoyable parts. I found the information about the chain of syscalls Apache makes to process an HTTP request and serve the response to be utterly fascinating. Chapter 19 is only chapter truly applicable to front-end performance. You should know everything in the chapter already but it is interesting largely because the advice it contains predates the current front-end performance movement by a good 7 years.
Key Performance Information
All but a very few bits of performance advice is obsolete and focuses entirely on the back-end. The main nuggets were things like: Use short filenames to save space. Minimize the use of symbolic links on the server. Turn off reverse DNS lookup for log files. Turn off mod_status. Set height and width HTML attributes to avoid repainting/re-rendering.
Verdict
Do Not Buy. This is no longer a useful book about web performance and based on the number of filler chapters I doubt its value when it was published. It is an enjoyable book if you are interested in learing more about how back-end web hardware functions. If so I suggest you find a used copy as the information this book contains is so out of date it’s not worth anywhere near its cover price. I purchased it for $2.77 from Amazon and was happy.
Building Scalable Web Sites. By Cal Henderson (O’Reilly 2006)
Cal is the lead developer of Flickr so he knows a thing or three about building complex web applications that have to performance for millions of users. Don’t pigeon-hole this book as a back-end hardware book. It is a holistic book that covers a lot of ground in just 320 pages. This book is a guide to the development processes and practices, as well as architectural and back-end design of web sites that can be maintained and scaled to immense levels of traffic. Yes there is information about load balancers and database clustering. But there is also information about coding practices: Using source code, branching, supporting international characters, abstracting away translations, abstracting/modulizing your code for easy updating, fail over, A/B testing of new features, and failover. Think of it as a modern version of Web Performance Tuning with current and proper information and no filler.
Key Performance Information
No specific advice per say. Instead this book is about how the design and building of web applications that are easy to maintain, expand and extended, and quickly replace based on the growth of your user base. It will change the way to build web applications.
Verdict
BUY! An excellent survey of the processes needed to build and grow truly scalable applications. Its information on building asynchronous remote systems is worth the price alone. I am using this as my bible as I design the web front-end to Zoompf’s scanning engine. I highly recommend this book to both web developers and IT operations.
Conclusions
There are some obvious must have web performance books available today. However there are additional books that provide insight into the tricks, tips, and processes needed to build high performance web applications that are not published elsewhere. Hopefully this post should help you build out your library of web performance books.
Did I miss one? Please comment below and tell me what other books you recommend that can contain good advice to improve website performance.
