Technofeel Things that keep me up late

Book Review: Even Faster Web Sites

I used to read a lot of books when I was a kid. Of course, not the kind of book I'm going to talk about, but still, I remember saving all my little money and running to the book store. Later on, my father forced me to buy more sophisticated books that were either too hard to read or not really interesting for a kid, and I ended up stopping reading for years.

Now that I'm almost done with college (a few months left !), I can proudly say that this school brought me one of the best practical learning available nowadays, but unfortunately it miserably lacks of theory and algorithms courses, so I'm back reading books to try to fill a bit of this missing knowledge by myself (so mainly geek books and thrillers ). ANYWAY ! All that life stuff to prepare you to see some book reviews from time to time

I'll start with "Even Faster Web Sites", Steve Souders latest book. If you're a bit involved into web development, you probably know who Steve is. He's the guru and best evangelist of front end performance problems and solutions, and a pretty nice person working for the big G. He's responsible for at least 30% of savings on the load time of all the major web sites you're using everyday.

I totally loved his first book, "High Performance Web Sites", a set of 14 rules to speed up your web site on the client side, something that was quite neglected before his insights. The book was very concise, with succinct examples and no extra fat.

His second book, also knows under the little name of "EFWS", follow the same format but with 6 chapters contributed from some front-end engineering rock stars. It's a pretty good initiative as it bring directly to the reader the loss less speech of experts on each domain. Steve also decided to write a blog post for each of these rules on his blog so everybody can benefit of his knowledge and hard work without having to buy the book, which shows his devotion on making the web a better place.

So here comes the time of my raw (and a bit rude) thoughts on "EFWS". Overall, the book is very good and brings another set of important rules that each web developer should know about (the chapter about CSS performance is surprising!). Unfortunately, unlike his first success, some chapters of "EFWS" really feel repetitive, as he had to fill the pages to get the book done. I would say that 35% of the book got me a little bored, but the 65 other percents were just all right, particularly the ones on Javascript internals, flushing early and CSS.

If you're a decent web developer and haven't read the first book, HPWS, well you're not a decent web developer and go grab a copy RIGHT NOW. Otherwise, I definitely recommend going through the blog posts on Steve's website, worth the read !