Rating:  - It works! After this lecture my site becomes 90% faster
This book brings 2 kinds of tricks: the ones that are right under your nose and you never think about it and ones that you possible never would hear about unless you read this book.
This book was very helpful. Applying this rules I made my website about to 90% faster than before.
Rating:  - High Performance Web Sites
Great discussion of common web site performance problems (and how to fix them). The author focuses on content serving, which he claims is where 80-90% of the user response time is spent. Is that really true once you go beyond large web sites such as Yahoo! that have already put a lot of effort into optimizing their back-ends? In any case, the book is so well done I can't not recommend it -- even if most of the information can be found on the web (look for talks given by the author, or the YSlow web site). The only criticism is that the book is rather slim: I'm sure there is a lot more to be said (e.g. on browser rendering performance issues). Looking forward to reading part 2!
Rating: - Optimizing the front-end experience
When conversation turns to performance, we often focus on the database, application servers, or a multitude of other backend processes, and completely forget about the front-end: CSS, JavaScript, filesizes, conditional requests, and request pipelining. In this book, Steve Souders documents the best practices for optimizing your front-end experience, which can often yield significant improvements with minimal code changes.
The detailed examples and associated discussions yield a lot of very useful tips - you'll definitely want to have this book near you. Likewise, the examples of dissecting the 10 most popular websites at the end of the book are very helpful, as they highlight the method, and also show how these practices have been adopted by different organizations.
Only word of forewarning: if you've read the YSlow documentation, then you won't find all that much new content in this book. Corollary: you can read the YSlow documentation to get many of the same tips and best practices, for free.
Rating: - Great for Frontend Engineers and Web Developers
I am no frontend engineer (these are people responsible for the performance of large web sites). However, I am always concerned with speed on the sites I run, so I decided to check out this book.
While most of the tips on it are strictly limited to things you can do only if you have access to your web server (Apache) settings, there's lots of useful information you can put to use if you are a web developer or simply if you have enough control over a web site, to be able to affect its performance (if you manage web content, this is your case).
Great examples of the use of the book to people beyond frontend engineers are recommendations about image types, stylesheet tips and things to do/avoid, in regards to JavaScript.
Rating: - Great, But is all Online
Great book, really! Easily read, an essential resource for anyone involved in web development, on any level!
However you can honestly find everything almost word for word online. In face if you just download the ySLow and firebug extentions for firefox you can go to any site and see how it uses these runs, and it will link to detailed info on each and everyone, all for free.
So if you hate reading online, then buy this, it is great, but seriosuly its free information.
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