Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Slim, but lots of good details
Comment: This book is small but contains a good collection of basic items everyone should know and use. Especially good in that most of these are simple but make a big difference to end-users, though this is all focused on the HTML/Web front-end and not databases or anything else regarding websites.
Customer Rating:
Summary: YSlow! overview from the author
Comment: While not all tips will apply to everyone, this is a great list of short, actionable items to increase the performance of your web site.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must-have for every serious Web developer and administrator
Comment: Steve's book fills an important void in the Web industry of assembling and codifying the best-practices for improving front-end performance. He writes in a very matter-of-fact style and provides lots of illustrative examples.
If you're tired of wading through RFCs and specs trying to figure out how things are *supposed* to work vs. how they *really* work, this book really adds value.
The last chapter, which evaluates the performance of top Web sites against the best-practices, provides real-world examples of what works (and in many cases, what doesn't).
I find myself referring to this book often. It should be on the shelf of every serious Web developer and system administrator.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Short and Sweet Rules to Enhance Performance
Comment: When I saw the title of this book regarding high performance in displaying web sites, I surmised correctly that the greatest benefit of this book would be for huge high-traffic commercial web sites. However, after checking the list of the fourteen rules provided to improve the performance of the rendering of the web pages of a web site, I felt
that I could profit from the application of the rules in the book even on the much smaller web sites that I maintain.
Although one does not need to understand the workings of retrieving web documents from a server and properly rendering them to your computer, the author uses the first two chapters in explaining how this is done, focusing mostly on the aspects that affect performance. The workings of the basic HTTP instruction, which requests the HTML document (the web page) from the server and downloads the contents of the document to your computer, is explained in great detail so that we can better understand the fourteen steps presented in the book as the way to obtain faster-loading web sites.
The first rule states that we need to make fewer HTTP requests with some suggestions as how to do this without sacrificing the design of the web site. Other rules show how using header instructions in our HTML code, we can enhance use of cache control and compression to increase document loading performance. Several of the rules involve CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)and Javascript scripting, describing how to design them and where to place them (top or bottom) in the HTML code to enhance
performance. These last rules work just as well for the smaller web sites as they do for the larger web sites. Other rules, like one that involves mutliple web servers to enhance web content delivery, are useful only for larger web sites.
A web developer interested in improving the downloading performance of his web sites will find this book very useful and will find the rules easy to apply. The developer need not understand fully the reasons behind the rules to effectively implement them into the HTML code of his web sites. I would definitely recommend this book to developers interested in improving the downloading performance of their web sites.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Guide To Front End Performance
Comment: One of the most noticeable and least expensive improvements you can make to increase the speed of your website is to implement these front-end techniques.
It is true that the 14 principles can be found in the description of the book, or with the excellent YSlow tool delivered by Yahoo! Developer Network.
So why should you buy the book??
The book explains "why" these 14 principles are best, and it does so in a concise format.
If you currently work professionally with the front-end side of a website (or would like to someday) this book should be considered a required read. At less than US$30, it is an inexpensive investment into your on-going education.
Don't settle with just knowing "how" to make your site faster, get the book and learn "why" these steps make your site faster. You'll be a better and more valuable developer for it.
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