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Steve Souders is an absolute genius. He generously shares his knowledge, in digestible tidbits, and structures everything so that its easy to grasp a complex topic (front-end website optimization) in a very reasonable amount of time.Whenever I hire someone for web development, I make them read this book before doing a single line of code. Whether you're a CSS designer who never does back-end work, or a Ruby on Rails guru who'd never dream of opening Photoshop/Gimp, this book strikes a common chord that all web developers need to understand.Of the scores of computer books that I've read, none of them has resonated so much and for so long as this book. My websites are better because of it, and everyone that I've lent this book to says that same thing.
This book lays down nicely all the theory needed to speed up web sites. It's easy to read and IMHO is an essential one for every web developer.
In High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers Steve Souders explains that at least 80 percent of the time it takes to display a web page happens after the HTML document has been downloaded, and describes the importance of the techniques in this book.The book is a quick read containing some good hints and tips. Many are fairly easily investigated and implemented in most companies.Seemingly out of place, however, is Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. While it's certainly a good way to improve performance, it's not something every company can afford.Overall, an interesting book.
By the title, I expected this book to cover configuring Apache, MySQL, PHP, Memcache, etc for high performance. Instead, this book covers optimization of client side code. The chapters appear to coincidence with Yahoo's YSlow plugin for Firefox (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/). Although it wasn't particularly useful for me, this would be an essential reference for a newbie web developer who is not sure about things like headers, Content Deliver Networks (CDN), or things of that nature.
There can be little dispute that the information contained in this very thin volume is of great value to anyone interested in website optimization.Your site could benefit greatly by putting into practice the '14 performance rules' espoused in this book. It's convenient to have the information in a book form. You can EASILY find this information all over the Internet.
Whether you will actually be able to implement -all- the rules is doubtful as some of the rules are extremely technical in nature and execution. He has also written the online help for YSLOW on the Yahoo Developer Network. You will learn abut the importance of making fewer HTTP requests, reducing DNS lookups, minifying javascript, avoiding redirects and other important "rules".The book is written in a very authoritative manner.
In fact, as it turns out the author of this book is the author of a plugin for Firefox (in conjunction with the Firebug extension) called YSLOW. Creating CSS Sprite Images, for instance, is not something many people would be able to execute, nor is minifying javascript or using a Content Delivery Network. Some of the rules are geared towards large websites backed by companies with pockets deep enough to finance the solutions suggested by the rules.The main problem I have with this book is the price.
Consequently a large portion of the essential information in this book is actually available online for no cost whatsoever.So the book is great and very valuable. but the price is pretty steep for such readily available, easily obtainable information.Content: 5 stars | Cost: 3 stars | Overall: 4 stars
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