Souders - Even faster web sites: [performance best practices for web developers]

Even Faster Web Sites contains six chapters contributed by the following authors.

Dion Almaer is the cofounder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. For his day job, Dion coleads a new group at Mozilla focusing on developer tools for the Web, something he has been passionate about doing for years. He is excited for the opportunity, and he gets to work with Ben Galbraith, his partner in crime on Ajaxian and now at Mozilla. Dion has been writing web applications since Gopher, has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles and a book, and, of course, covers life, the universe, and everything else on his blog at http://almaer.com/blog.

Douglas Crockford was born in the wilds of Minnesota, but left when he was only six months old because it was just too damn cold. He turned his back on a promising career in television when he discovered computers. He has worked in learning systems, small business systems, office automation, games, interactive music, multimedia, location-based entertainment, social systems, and programming languages. He is the inventor of Tilton, the ugliest programming language that was not specifically designed to be an ugly programming language. He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He discovered the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data interchange format. He is currently working on making the Web a secure and reliable software-delivery platform. He has his work cut out for him.

Ben Galbraith is the codirector of developer tools at Mozilla and the cofounder of Ajaxian.com. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at 6 years old, started his first business at 10, and entered the IT workforce at 12. He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations worldwide, produced several technical conferences, and coauthored more than a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, and software industries. He lives in Palo Alto, California with his wife and five children.

Tony Gentilcore is a software engineer at Google. There, he has helped make the Google home and search results pages lightning fast. He finds that the days seem to fly by while writing web performance tools and techniques. Tony is also the creator of the popular Firefox extension, Fasterfox.

Dylan Schiemann is CEO of SitePen and cofounder of the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit for rapidly building web sites and applications, and is an expert in the technologies and opportunities of the Open Web. Under his guidance, SitePen has grown from a small development firm to a leading provider of inventive tools, skilled software engineers, knowledgeable consulting services, and top-notch training and advice. Dylans commitment to R&D has enabled SitePen to be a major contributor to and creator of pioneering open source web development toolkits and frameworks such as Dojo, cometD, Direct Web Remoting (DWR), and Persevere. Prior to SitePen, Dylan developed web applications for companies such as Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks, and Vizional Technologies. He is a cofounder of Comet Daily, LLC, a board member at Dojo Foundation, and a member of the advisory board at Aptana. Dylan earned his masters in physical chemistry from UCLA and his B.A. in mathematics from Whittier College.

Stoyan Stefanov is a Yahoo! frontend developer, focusing on web application performance. He is also the architect of the performance extension YSlow 2.0 and cocreator of the Smush.it image optimization tool. Stoyan is a speaker, book author (Object-Oriented JavaScript from Packt Publishing), and blogger at http://phpied.com, http://jspatterns.com, and YUIblog.

Nicole Sullivan is an evangelist, frontend performance consultant, and CSS Ninja. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question, How do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with the W3C for their beta redesign, and she is the cocreator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable frontend architecture for large commercial websites. Nicole speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at The Ajax Experience, ParisWeb, and Web Directions North. She blogs at http://stubbornella.org.

Nicholas C. Zakas is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, Second Edition (Wrox) and coauthor of Professional Ajax, Second Edition (Wrox). Nicholas is principal frontend engineer for the Yahoo! home page and is also a contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. He blogs regularly at his site, http://www.nczonline.net.