High Performance Browser Networking

Foreword

“Good developers know how things work. Great developers know why things work.”

We all resonate with this adage. We want to be that person who understands and can explain the underpinning of the systems we depend on. And yet, if you’re a web developer, you might be moving in the opposite direction.

Web development is becoming more and more specialized. What kind of web developer are you? Frontend? Backend? Ops? Big data analytics? UI/UX? Storage? Video? Messaging? I would add “Performance Engineer” making that list of possible specializations even longer.

It’s hard to balance studying the foundations of the technology stack with the need to keep up with the latest innovations. And yet, if we don’t understand the foundation our knowledge is hollow, shallow. Knowing how to use the topmost layers of the technology stack isn’t enough. When the complex problems need to be solved, when the inexplicable happens, the person who understands the foundation leads the way.

That’s why High Performance Browser Networking is an important book. If you’re a web developer, the foundation of your technology stack is the Web and the myriad of networking protocols it rides on: TCP, TLS, UDP, HTTP, and many others. Each of these protocols has its own performance characteristics and optimizations, and to build high performance applications you need to understand why the network behaves the way it does.

Thank goodness you’ve found your way to this book. I wish I had this book when I started web ...