Stoyan Stefanov - Web Performance Daybook Volume 2

In the spirit of the true high-performance, non-blocking asynchronous delivery, you now have the Web Performance Daybook, Volume 2 published before Volume 1. I hope you'll enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed working on it and rubbing (virtual) shoulders with some of the brightest people in our industry.

Back in December 2009, I wanted to give an overview of the web performance optimization (WPO) discipline. I decided on a self-imposed deadline of an-article-a-day from December 1 to 24: the format of an advent calendar similar to http://www.24ways.org. As it turned out, 24 articles in a row was quite a challenge and so I was happy and grateful to accept the offers for help from a few friends from the industry: Christian Heilmann (Mozilla), Eric Goldsmith (AOL), and two posts from Ara Pehlivanian (Yahoo!).

The articles were warmly accepted by the community and then the following year, in December 2010, the calendar was already something people were looking forward to reading. The calendar also got a new home at http://calendar.perfplanet.com as a subdomain of the Planet Performance feed aggregator. And this time around more people were willing to help. Developers of all around our industry were willing to contribute their time, to share and spread their knowledge, announce new tools, and this way create a much better set of 24 articles than a single person could. This is what soon will become Volume 1 of the series of Daybooks.

Then came December 2011, and we had so much good content and enthusiasm that we kept going past December 24, all the way to December 31, even publishing two articles on the last day. This is the content that you have in your hands in a book format as Web Performance Daybook, Volume 2 .

Our WPO community is young, small, but growing, and in need of nourishment in the form of community building events such as the advent calendar. That's why it was exciting to have the opportunity to collaborate on this title with O'Reilly and all 32 authors. I'm really happy with the result and I know that both volumes will serve as a reference and introduction to performance tools, research, techniques, and approaches for years to come. Theres always the risk with outdated content in offline technical publications, but I see references to the calendar articles in the latest conferences today all the time, so I'm confident this knowledge is to remain fresh for quite a while and some of it is even destined to become timeless.

Enjoy the book, prepare to learn from the brightest in the industry and, most of all, be ready to make the Web a better place for all of us!

About the Authors

Patrick Meenan

Patrick Meenan (http://blog.patrickmeenan.com/) (@patmeenan) created WebPagetest (http://www.webpagetest.org/) while working at AOL and now works at Google with the team that is working to make the Web faster (http://code.google.com/speed/).

Nicholas Zakas

Nicholas C. Zakas (http://www.nczonline.net/) (@slicknet) is chief architect of WellFurnished, a site dedicated to helping you find beautiful home decor. Prior to that, he worked at Yahoo! for almost five years, where he was a presentation architect, frontend lead for the Yahoo! homepage, and a contributor to the YUI library. He is the author of Maintainable JavaScript (OReilly, 2012), Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox, 2012), Professional Ajax (Wrox, 2007), and High Performance JavaScript (OReilly, 2010). Nicholas is a strong advocate for development best practices including progressive enhancement, accessibility, performance, scalability, and maintainability. He blogs regularly at http://www.nczonline.net/.

Guy Podjarny