Comments about oreilly Even Faster Web Sites:

Today's Web developer knows that the speed of one's site is an important measure to its overall success, and Steve Souders' previous book, High Performance Web Sites (O'Reilly), laid out what seemed to be every way to achieve good performance gains without the sacrifice of functionality or aesthetics. When I began reading Souders' Even Faster Web Sites, I therefore wondered how he could possibly demonstrate fresh ways to achieve performance gains without regurgitating the content of his previous book. What I discovered as I read Even Faster Web Sites was it presented all new best practices for making your web sites "leaner and meaner" without repeating the content of his last book.

Even Faster Web Sites takes the latest techniques available to developers and organizes them into three performance areas: JavaScript, network, and browser. Though I believe Souder knows what he is talking about regarding web site performance, I found it refreshing this time around that he had the contributions of other experts in the field to give their ideas on performance gains in these areas.

I thought the chapters on JavaScript, especially those discussing Ajax and asynchronous techniques, were well written and gave good, new best practices to trim time off the loading of content on a site. I also appreciated the chapter dealing with Comet, as these technologies are surely a driving force for future web applications, and having best practices early in their development will only help their progress. Of the two chapters on browser performance, I found the honesty of the discussion on the downsides of using iframes most helpful, especially when their use was discussed as a viable technique for improving performance early in the book. I did find the chapter on CSS selectors extremely useful for analyzing where slowdowns in styling may exist based on browser implementation. The chapters on network performance gave a good background on common hindrances such as connection limits and poor image choices, but also walked through what I felt were performance gains that can be made through less utilized techniques like chunked encoding and better compression.

Souder finished this book with an Appendix on performance tools that can be used to help in the improvement of a web site, which I found to be immensely helpful. While many tools he listed are well known to developers, there are some I was unaware of and began making use of immediately on my own sites.

Even Faster Web Sites is an excellent follow-up to High Performance Web Sites, giving new best practices for making your web sites even faster. As I see it, even hundredths of a second begin to add up when you put all of these techniques together, and most of the techniques presented in this book are practical for any web site being developed. I would recommend this book to any developer looking for ways to improve the performance of his web site, as Souder has certainly demonstrated his knowledge and expertise on improving the speed of a site.

Comments about oreilly Even Faster Web Sites:

This book is a solid follow up from the first book titled High Performance Web Sites (O'Reilly) and a similar style is used through out.

In the first book several more basic points were made about web performance and I think those were low hanging fruit that should be very easy to implement. Examples include using compression/minification, organizing page content for faster loads, and avoiding redirects/double loads.

This book picks up with a theme that is taylored to more interactive web sites using JavaScript and Web 2.0. Also, newer browsers such as IE 8, Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.1 Beta are covered.

The coverage of newer browser behavior was appreciated since these browsers behave significantly differently from the last version. IE 6 and 7 are fairly close in behavior while IE 8 has more significant changes. A similar comparison can be made between Firefox versions.

The authors spend a significant amount of time on JavaScript as well. The tips for JavaScript are effective and the author has links to the test pages so the reader can work with the examples while following the book.

Other sections cover compression (following up from teh first book again), optimizing the loading of images, and allowing CSS and JS scripts to work faster. Additionally more coverage is given to optimizing CSS and using CSS in effective ways.

Overall this is a nice "part 2" in what I consider a series. The information was both helpful as a web developer and worked as stated. The information was presented plainly enough that amatuer developers should have no trouble following the text.

I would recommend reading "High Performance Web Sites" also and using the two books together for maximum results.