CS193H: High Performance Web Sites

This isn't bad, but it's client focused. Perhaps there should be a second module that focuses on specific web server architectures (apache vs nginx and lighttpd), reverse proxying performance, performance of web servers talking to different data stores and the performance of those stores. Also server-side caching architectures as well as server hardware and what works best for web servers, caching servers and data stores.

How is there an entire class devoted to "Rule 5: Put stylesheets at the top"? Yes, I clicked through the slides; it took 2 minutes.

Steve Sounders is a wealth of information. His http archive (<a href="http://httparchive.org/" rel="nofollow">http://httparchive.org/</a>) is already showing fundamental changes in design, as well as regularly giving good tips on high-scalability sites. I am jealous of those who get to take the full course. =]

I don't get it, where's the class on multi-tier server architecture? Load-balancing techniques? Server scaling? Database / backend performance best practices? I appreciate the focus on the front-end, and YSlow best practices, but I'm surprised that this kind of class is completely neglecting the backend - which is just as, if not more important, for scaling a major production website.

I know it's not technically computer science and it's more vocational, but I wish my school offered classes like these. Something like this would be more beneficial to me than, say, Theory of Automata, I think.

Anyone know where this falls in the standard computer science course?

did anyone else just assume by default this was cs193h-class.org ?