Pro JavaScript Performance: Monitoring and Visualization (Expert's Voice in Web Development) - Softcover

Barker, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1430247495 ISBN 13: 9781430247494

Publisher: Apress, 2012

Synopsis

Performance is a hugely important area of web development. If your site runs slowly, users are going to leave, and the problem only grows as your site gets more popular. Pro JavaScript Performance gives you the tools you need to keep your sites smooth and responsive no matter how many users you have. Best practices are changing or becoming redefined continually because of changes and optimizations at the interpreter level, and differences in system configuration, and network speeds. This is exacerbated by the quickened release schedule that most browsers have adopted. Just as important as following best practices is the ability to measure your own performance, so that you can adjust as times change, and so that you can note the subtle nuances in your own code and define your own best practices by your own observations. This book gives you the tools to observe and track the performance of your web applications over time from multiple perspectives, so that you are always aware of, and can fix, all aspects of your performance. What you'll learn Describes the different aspects of performance, and explores the tools for quantifying and improving performance Provides tactical solutions for creating tools to measure the performance of your own web applications Learn to apply performance best practices, and how to quantify your results Who this book is for Pro JavaScript Performance is written for advanced JavaScript users and web developers. You will need a strong understanding of JavaScript to get the most from this book. Table of Contents What Is Performance? Tools and Technology to Measure and Impact Performance WPTRunner Automated Performance Monitoring and Visualization with WebPagetest perfLogger JavaScript Benchmarking and Logging Looking Forward, A Standard for Performance Web Performance Optimizations Runtime Performance Balancing Performance with Software Engineering Best Practices and Running in Production

About this title

From the Author

From a piece I just wrote for UX Magazine that pretty accurately sums up my intention with this book:
Authoring an optimal experience for users is an integral part of development, but for many developers performance can be a moving target. Even when adhering to current best practices and delivering satisfactory site performance, changes to the ecosystem can upset the balance. These changes could be new features introduced, new browsers released to the market, shifting browser market share, or even new hardware/operating system releases (especially with the recent release of Windows 8/IE10).
How should developers react to these changes? Not by simply following convention, but by actively monitoring the performance of sites, running in-house performance tests, and proactively gathering site-specific metrics. Not everyone has the same user base--the best practices that work today may not be as relevant as user bases change or evolve.
By monitoring the performance of sites over time, developers can track how changes impact performance and react in real-time to these changes. If a framework for performance monitoring is established, developers can then take optimizations to the next level and run multivariate tests to see just how much improvement can be made, or pinpoint what focus areas return the most value for investment.
Simply monitoring is the first step, but learning to communicate findings to teams of developers and larger organizations presents another level of analytics. Using the R Language, developers can craft charts and data visualizations to make their findings immediately digestible no matter the experience level of their audiences.
The goal with Pro JavaScript Performance is to give readers the tools to do all of this. The book describes the different aspects of performance, and explores the tools for quantifying and improving performance. It also provides tactical solutions for creating tools to measure the performance of your own web applications. Finally the book shows how to use R to create data visualizations from logged performance data.

About the Author

Tom Barker is an engineer, a professor and an author. Currently he is Sr Manager of Web Development at Comcast, and an instructor at Philadelphia University. He has authored several books on web development including Pro JavaScript Performance: Monitoring and Visualization, and Pro Data Visualization with JavaScript and R.

Edition details

• Publisher: Apress
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1430247495
• ISBN 13: 9781430247494
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231