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Comment by lightcatcher | Hacker News Reader

really? I'm actually glad my school doesn't offer vocational classes like this. Optimizing a website on the client side is the sort of thing you read a blog post for and then go do. I don't enjoy it at all when I actually have to do it, I certainly wouldn't want to take a course where I have to do this.

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Not necessarily this class specifically, but there is not a single class at my college where I can learn about HTML/CSS/JS and their best practices. Nothing where I can learn about MVC and RESTful architectures, how to implement them, common pitfalls, etc.

Sure, there's a blog or a doctoral thesis that I can read to get an understanding of these things, but hearing it from someone who's been there and has made the mistakes is invaluable. Plus, it's often hard to motivate myself to learn about these things that are less interesting to me, but critical to my future employment when I'm taking 17 hours and working as part of a Java development team part time.

that may be the newbest thing I've read on hacker news. It only shows you haven't worked in high performance environments.

Do you believe that there aren't more useful things to learn in school? Stuff like this is fairly trivial to teach to yourself. I believe the time would be better served by taking a class in something like game theory or any one of the other mind-expanding courses offered (especially at a school like Stanford).

As for the actual content of the class, all you really need to tell someone is that various things can make pages load slowly, and then link them to some guide such as this: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html .

Also, I still have this opinion after working last summer in what I would consider a high performance environment at a YC company.

I believe that CS courses should include more real world practices and situations. After interviewing hundreds of cs grads over the past decade it only re-enforces that belief.

I actually think high performance web architecture could make for an excellent mind-broadening course. Consider the things you need a deep understanding of:

- DNS, how it works, DNS level load balancing, DNS client implementations in operating systems

- Internet routing architecture and CDNs

- Browser internals: how modern browsers access the network, how their parsers work, how they parallelise requests

- In-depth understanding of both JavaScript and the DOM

- How CSS style engines work

- Different image file formats

- How compression works

- How to introspect and monitor web page performance

- How to reverse-engineer complex web sites

I agree all of these things would be good to learn in a course. I think a course that taught these things would be better structured as a course that teaches about these, and then at some point have a 15 minute talk (or a set/project) about how these concepts affect the load time for web pages and how one can make pages load faster.

There is a course at my school that's somewhat similar to this (http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs144/ ), but it looks at web from a very theoretical level. Out of the list you posted above, it definitely teaches about how the internet is architechted (and therefore why CDN's are a good idea). DNS is covered in a networking class, and compression (lossy and lossless) is addressed in other classes.

It seems like many of the things this Stanford course teaches are things that CS students should already know from other CS classes and they just have to figure out how to apply them. The class seems like it could be a valuable introduction to non CS majors who just want to understand how the web works so they can build some web app or something.

It's a nice coincidence that the previous comment points to the YDN articles that I also wrote. (If you click the "dicuss this rule" link on http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html you'll see the original articles were written by me: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/04/rule_1_ma... )

There are many ways to get this material. I taught this Stanford class in 2008. You can use the class syllabus for free ( http://cs193h.stevesouders.com/ ). You can pay to watch 20+ hours of videos through Stanford ( http://scpd.stanford.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do... ). All the lectures are based on my two books (High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites). Each book has a companion website with examples etc ( http://stevesouders.com/hpws/ and http://stevesouders.com/efws/ ). And there are blog posts that summarize each chapter ( http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/04/rule_1_ma... and http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/23/even-faster-web-... ).

Hopefully there's a format and price point that works for most people. Read my blog and follow me on Twitter to stay up to date. @souders

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