Here's the first review to kick off. It's of a book called "High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers"
Quick review:
It's really good, you should read it.
Or if you want some more to read:
I'd been using the Firebug extension for quite a while, and heard about Yahoo's YSlow piggy-back plugin which analyses a site's performance and provides lots of handy data and tools.
Load a page, check YSlow, and find out the page seems to have a crap mark, like an "F" or something, and 13 sub items. Some of these items are quite obvious - like "GZip components" or "make fewer http requests" - and relatively straightforward to implement. However there are some mystery meat items there - like "configure ETags". Personally I had no idea what that meant at all, so pretty much started getting "C" grades by fixing the simple stuff.
It turns out there's a complementary book, which goes into detail about the research and thinking that led to YSlow, and behind that the desire to get the best performance possible from a website. It's quite thin too, which seems to be either a good sign or an indicator that what's inside is top-level mindfuck. This one (for Brains here anyway) contains a bit of both.
Probably one of the best things about the book is the way it gives you an insight into the way browsers actually function, without killing you stone dead. An overview of the process of downloading a web page in a browser is fundamentally important, and here are laid out in a helpful way. Know your medium etc.
I've been putting as much of these steps into practice as possible on recent builds, and there's a really noticeable jump in speed and responsiveness. It's also good to have this stuff in mind when developing - I guess it's like the 'ol gifs-n-jpegs, where the considerations should simply become habit.
The one that got me, and seems to have a huge effect: "Put JS at the bottom".
In conclusion:
A big thumbs up for this one, in fact a "must read".
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