David Arthur said
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.
M. Erb said
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. 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. 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. 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. You can EASILY find this information all over the Internet. 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. He has also written the online help for YSLOW on the Yahoo Developer Network. 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. It's convenient to have the information in a book form... but the price is pretty steep for such readily available, easily obtainable information.
Content: 5 stars | Cost: 3 stars | Overall: 4 stars
Mark Ruzomberka said
This book is like the dictionary of Web Site Performance. This is a great book to have on your shelf and pull out as a reference. I got halfway through and realized I had read most of the content already when parsing through the ySlow application documentation. Also, much of this information is available online, but it is nice to have the book to refer to when you are working on a specific problem.
There are so many ideas here that implementing them all at the same time will be nearly impossible for most people. I like having the book so I can pull it off the shelf in a few months and read my underlining and dog-eared pages so keeps Steve's ideas and my own in one place.
A. M. Inscore said
Starts out with some decent information, and then slowly degrades as it goes on. Very repetitive, the author makes it pretty clear he has a minimum page requirement. There are some better O'Reilly books that would serve the same purpose more effectively. Definitely not worth the money.
James Shaw said
Every few often there comes a book that's so impactful that it influences the rest of your career; this is one of them. It was especially revealing to learn that front-end engineering is where the biggest bang for the buck is in terms of optimizing your site.
It's great how this book is in distilling the best optimizations to do for a website into 14 simple rules, that doesn't take up hundreds of pages; it really speaks volumes to the author's writing ability.
It's also an added bonus that the author provides the free tool YSlow to help analyzing your website. Overall I'm really glad I read this book :).
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