Tips aged poorly and were overly folksy (not a ton of great measurement or comparison of tradeoffs). ( )

This book is like a sequel to the High Performance Web Sites by the same author.

Although there are some concepts in this book that I would've probably never used, mostly because I never knew about them. That does not mean to say I'll use those concepts regularly now, but they are definitely a good thing to know.

My best take-away from this book are two chapter 7 - Writing efficient JS and chapter 14 - Simplifying CSS. These are probably the most crucial aspects to work on when you start doing slightly advanced performance analysis on your site.

After reading chapter 10 - Optimizing Images, I started saying 'Image size reduces by 30kb... sure I'll do it'. Before, I would've said '30kb.. never mind'.

The downside of this book is that it'll change your perspective about web development forever. ( )

Steve Souders has been a leader in documenting and evangelizing techniques for improving web site performance, and his previous book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (or the web posting from which it evolved) is essential reading. Even Faster Web Sites is not an updating of that book, but a collection of additional advice from Souders and eight contributors. So the first thing to note is that you should probably only tackle this book if you've already mastered the techniques outlined in High Performance Web Sites.

The one exception to the advice above may be if you're a web developer who makes heavy use of Javascript, since over half of this book is devoted to AJAX. The remainder of the book addresses a variety of topics of interest to web development professionals in general: optimizing images, writing efficient CSS, advanced techniques for implementing gzipping, and more.

As with Souders' previous book, there is little that will be new to professionals who've kept up with best practices via blogs and the like, but it's still nice to have all the information in one handy book. For those who are just starting to investigate web performance optimization, High Performance Web Sites plus Even Faster Web Sites will get you up to speed quickly. ( )

Good book. Small but packed with information. It's really only useful for developers that are running high-traffic sites. If you're not getting 100k visitors per day then many of the ideas will be overkill. But if you are getting that kind of traffic then most of the ideas will be things that you will need to be looking into. ( )

While this book contains information of use to any web developer (particularly the chapters about JavaScript and image optimization), some of the information will be relevant only for those working on larger-scale websites (e.g. the use of Comet and web workers).

I found the chapters on loading JavaScript without blocking other downloads, and position of inline scripts to be particularly useful, though these aren't things I would generally worry about too much on lower traffic websites. ( )