I finally finished reading Even Faster Web Sites. It’s good, but in terms of things for my day to day, it’s kind of a mixed bag. In some ways (specifically in the areas of JavaScript efficiency, image compression and CSS selectors) it’s more practical than High Performance Web Sites and in others I had a hard time coming up with a concrete example that I’d actually run across that would be served by the topic at hand.
With that in mind, looking at the table of contents I found the bolded chapters most interesting for my day-to-day coding (your mileage may vary, of course)
Chapter 1. Understanding Ajax Performance
Chapter 2. Creating Responsive Web Applications
Chapter 3. Splitting the Initial Payload
Chapter 4. Loading Scripts Without Blocking
Chapter 5. Coupling Asynchronous Scripts
Chapter 6. Positioning Inline Scripts
Chapter 7. Writing Efficient JavaScript
Chapter 8. Scaling with Comet
Chapter 9. Going Beyond Gzipping
Chapter 10. Optimizing Images
Chapter 11. Sharding Dominant Domains
Chapter 12. Flushing the Document Early
Chapter 13. Using Iframes Sparingly
Chapter 14. Simplifying CSS Selectors
Appendix A. Performance Tools
Which isn’t to say that the other chapters weren’t interesting. They were, I just don’t need to deal with some of the issues solved by those techniques very often in my day job. That was especially true of the the Comet chapter and many of the issues related to managing multiple script files and/or large blocks of JS code.
Some comments on the chapters I found most interesting:
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