About this Book
The purpose of Web Performance in Action is to teach you how to create faster websites, and through the course of this book, I’ll help you get here. The techniques you’ll learn as you read should also come in handy for improving performance on existing websites.
This book focuses heavily (though not exclusively) on improving website performance on the client side. This means that it’s targeted toward front-end developers who have a good command of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You, the reader, should be comfortable working with these technologies.
This book occasionally strays into the server side where appropriate. For instance, some server-side code examples are in PHP. These examples are intended to be illustrative of a concept, and are often peripheral to the task at hand. Chapter 10 covers server compression, including the new Brotli compression algorithm, which fits into the server-side category. Chapter 11 explains HTTP/2, so having an interest in how this new protocol can affect how you optimize your site can be helpful.
You should also be somewhat comfortable on the command line, but even if you’re not, you’ll still be able to follow along in the examples provided. Now, let’s talk about how this book is structured.