Comments on: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers

By: Edge

Edge — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:21:26 +0000

The ideas in the book are excellent. I'm all for an organized checklist of techniques to make web sites faster. The problem, is that once you have read the documentation for Yslow (the firebug plugin that grades sites based on these criteria) you will find the book provides little to no more substantive information. I had looked forward to it, purchased it, and have since given it away. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I love the ideas, but this book just didn't deliver.

By: Idella

Idella — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:09:17 +0000

While the information in the book is good information to know, it is (as others have said) information that pretty much gave a “yeah, I knew that” type of impression. And at only 137 pages of text, it’s a very light read. If you are a new web developer, this is a nice collection of tips. As an experienced developer, there’s nothing new here. And at $29 for its minimal 137 pages, it’s really just an expensive checklist of 14 simple items. Too pricey for what you get in my opinion.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:45:05 +0000

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_High Performance Web Sites_ is one of those books that will get read by more people than buy it because it is both a fast read and organized into clearly differentiated subjects. This makes it easy to pick up for a moment or pass along to team members with different specialties.

Each of these "14 Steps to Faster-Loading Web Sites" (listed in the editorial review above) is itself divided into related tips with practical pointers. The fact that the book is full of these pointers is not the only value I extracted. We also get something a bit more subtle. The fact that the author is a performance expert at one of the mega-companies that define the Web for most of us lends authority to the book. It is easy to have confidence that his practical experience will have immediate lessons for teams with the same problems, if on a smaller scale.

Steve Souders provides a special addition to his tips: his example pages offer direct comparisons and means to make our own tests. This is something rarely encountered in such books. The book ends with a 30-page chapter where he deconstructs 10 of the top Web sites in the U.S. using the rules and tools described in the book.
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