High Performance Responsive Design: Building Faster Sites Across Devices

Yes, you can use responsive web design to create high performance, compelling websites. With this practical book, author Tom Barker demonstrates that responsive design is not just a frontend-only approach, but also a philosophy for taking advantage of the entire web stack. Responsive design patterns and anti-patterns, derived from heavily used real-world sites, are guiding principles throughout the book.

Ideal for frontend-focused web developers, this book shows you how to incorporate responsiveness and performance into your project plan, use Node.js for device-specific functionality on the backend, and write automated tests for a continuous integration environment. You’ll explore many useful tools and responsive frameworks, and gain useful insights from Barker’s own experience with responsive design along the way.

• Get a primer on web performance concepts, web runtime performance, and performance tracking tools
• Write functionality with Node.js that serves up a device-specific experience to the client
• Explore client-side solutions, such as lazy loading entire sections of a page—including images, styling, and content
• Validate service level agreements (SLAs) by writing automated tests with PhantomJS
• Examine several responsive frameworks, including the author’s server-side framework, Ripple

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: State of the Industry of Responsive Design
Chapter 2: Primer on Performance of Web Applications
Chapter 3: Start with a Plan
Chapter 4: The Backend
Chapter 5: The Frontend
Chapter 6: Continuous Web Performance Testing
Chapter 7: Frameworks