Tucson Adobe User Group

Great book! This book has lots of good tips even for experienced web developers. The first few chapters cover all the JavaScript tricks to prevent your page from slowing down from all the JavaScript you may be using on your web site. With the popularity of AJAX, jquery and all the other JavaScript frameworks and pulg-ins out there, the techniques you learn in the first few chapters are critical. It's easy to get carried away with all the JavaScript magic out there. Gzip compression is a wonderful piece of magic that compresses the text-based files on your server. This is probably one of the most important techniques for speeding up a web site. All browsers support gzip compression but there is a small percentage of visitors that do not have gzip compression support. Chapter 9 explains where the 15% is coming from. There are some good image optimization tips, an explanation on CSS selectors and which ones you should use, as well as some performance tools you can try out. I think the most important thing you can learn from this book is that web site optimization starts with the people designing and developing the site. If it's not right, it doesn't matter if it is fast. I will definitely have this book handy every time I run into some site performance issues on a site.