Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic and very useful. I actually read the whole thing!
Review: Although we all know it is important to have fast loading pages few Web developers have a real idea about how users really respond and how long they will wait. Andy King has obviously gone to great trouble to empirically determine what people will put up with and does a great job of explaining how and why to speed thigns up. Some of his ideas are very simple to use and extremely effective. I don't consider myself to be a hard-core techie (just a suit who wished he were) and I found the book to be a good read. His tips on using gzip are the best. It really works and is easy to do and understand.
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Summary: An ESSENTIAL Book for Any Serious Web Designer
Review: Andy King, the guru behind WebReference.com and JavaScript.com, sent me a review copy of his new book "Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization" a few weeks ago, and it absolutely knocked my socks off.If you aren't familiar with Web site optimization (WSO), it's a series of techniques that minimize Web page file sizes and maximize page display speeds. In other words, WSO is simple stuff you can do to the Web pages you create to make those pages load faster. After all, people HATE waiting for slow Web pages. What King has done in "Speed Up Your Site" is not only assemble pretty much every WSO technique known to man, he's also collected the research and conducted the interviews explaining WHY these techniques actually work. While the entire book is exceptional, the four chapters in "Part II - Optimizing Markup: HTML and XHTML" are absolutely worth their weight in gold. It is in these four chapters that King shows you, step-by-step, how to clean up HTML bloat; minimize HTTP requests; tighten up comma-delimited attributes; speed up table rendering; and much, much more. And the results will ASTOUND you. For example, using the techniques in just these four chapters alone, I was able to make my NetSquirrel.com homepage 26.5% smaller and load 42.9% faster. Words can't describe how cool that is. The four chapters in Part II of King's book are accessible to ANYONE who knows simple HTML. That's not quite true for the next five chapters. In "Part III - DHTML Optimization: CSS and JavaScript," King shows you how to optimize your CSS and speed up your JS download and execution speeds. Of course, if [like me] you don't know CSS or JS from a hole in the ground, these five chapters aren't going to be much help to you. CSS and JS aren't topics for the weak of heart, and optimization only makes those topics that much more complex. But, if you *DO* know CSS and JS, King offers step-by-step instructions and real-world examples that show you what you need to do to maximize your page display speeds. Let me also put in a plug for Chapter 15 - Keyword Optimization. This chapter shows you how to fine tune your page's meta keywords so that you can attract both search engines and, more importantly, visitors. Every Web design book tells you that you need to use meta keywords. King actually shows you how to find the meta keywords that yield the highest results. Instead of paying someone else lots of money to attract visitors to your site, follow the 10 steps that King outlines in this chapter. You'll save yourself both time and, more importantly, LOTS of money. As I said earlier, Andy King's "Speed Up Your Site" absolutely knocked my socks off. There are a squillion Web design books out there, but this one belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Web designer.
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Summary: Best practical web performance optimization guide available
Review: Covering a wide variety of techniques, this book describes many of the common causes of slow pages and how to avoid or remedy them. While not specific to load testing, it is a valuable reference for those who have the task of making a site faster. Many of the methods provided here are simple but rarely implemented - they should be! Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com
Rating:
Summary: Full of useful information for page designers
Review: I recommend it for page designers at all levels. It has up-to-date advice on everything from coding to enticing search engines to rank your page highly. You owe it to yourself to read it ... and to the users who visit your pages.
Rating:
Summary: Full of useful information for page designers
Review: I recommend it for page designers at all levels. It has up-to-date advice on everything from coding to enticing search engines to rank your page highly. You owe it to yourself to read it ... and to the users who visit your pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Speed - a critical factor in site success
Review: In over 8 years of web development, and having sat through countless usability tests and user feedback sessions, I can say without any doubt that a slow site spells disaster if you want people to actually use it and you want to acquire and keep happy customers. Even with higher levels of penetration of faster internet connections, a fast site is a hugely important factor in the quality of the overall online customer experience. For this reason, Andy King's book 'Speed up your site' is an important addition to any web developer, or web manager's, library. As Andy rightly points out the subject of site speed has been written about in articles a lot but it is a topic that is deserving of an entire book. In his book, Andy has drawn upon his great wealth of experience to pull together a mix of theory and practice, supported by case studies, to help you deliver a faster site. More marketing and business-focused web professionals will get most out of the sections on 'The Psychology of Performance' and 'Search Engine Optimization' whereas more development, design and technically-focused practitioners will benefit from the detailed analysis, including example code, contained in the sections 'Optimizing Markup: HTML and XHTML', 'DHTML Optimization: CSS and JavaScript', 'Graphics and Multimedia Optimization' and 'Advanced Optimization Techniques'. Each section finishes with a Case Study which is a great way to see the issues in a practical context. Ashley Friedlein
CEO: e-consultancy.com Author: "Web Project Management: Delivering Successful Commercial Web Sites"
Author: "Maintaining and Evolving Successful Commercial Web Sites: Managing Change, Content, Customer Relationships and Site Measurement"
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Summary: Grab this book to save bandwidth and improve speed!
Review: King has some amazing insights and tips on how to get your website to respond faster. Your clients will be happy, your ISP company will charge less and your site will be faster. The bandwidth you will save on a single month will cover the costs of this great reference. Plus, you get a good overview of search engine visibilty.
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Summary: A Fantastic Resource for Designers and Marketers Alike
Review: King has written a masterpiece. Web site response time can literally make or break a Web site's success. Companies spend millions on strategies to drive visitors to their expensive Web sites but if the site doesn't load quickly enough, it's over; you have lost an opportunity to win a new customer. Internet users are not patient! Get your site to pop up quickly or you lose, no matter how many people find your site in search engines or click on your banner ads -- what a terrible waste of marketing dollars! This book is loaded with practical information on speeding load time via changes to HTML, JavaScript, graphics, PDF files, multimedia, and other elements. Plus, it includes an entire chapter on compression, and not just the graphic variety. "Speed Up Your Site" is simply a must-read for anyone, not just Web developers, who are responsible for a Web site's success. There's even great data to help you make your case to your boss that you've got a problem that needs to be addressed, and, a powerful chapter on Search Engine Optimization -- a chapter that distills down a great deal of complicated information into some very simple to follow steps that will get your site top rankings in search engines. I read this book, I loved this book, it was easy to read, and I have already sent copies to friends in the industry. It is that valuable. I recommend this book and I encourage you to own it -- you will not be disappointed. It is, hands down, the best book I have read on building or re-designing a Web site. Fredrick Marckini
Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Resource for Designers and Marketers Alike
Review: King has written a masterpiece. Web site response time can literally make or break a Web site's success. Companies spend millions on strategies to drive visitors to their expensive Web sites but if the site doesn't load quickly enough, it's over; you have lost an opportunity to win a new customer. Internet users are not patient! Get your site to pop up quickly or you lose, no matter how many people find your site in search engines or click on your banner ads -- what a terrible waste of marketing dollars! This book is loaded with practical information on speeding load time via changes to HTML, JavaScript, graphics, PDF files, multimedia, and other elements. Plus, it includes an entire chapter on compression, and not just the graphic variety. "Speed Up Your Site" is simply a must-read for anyone, not just Web developers, who are responsible for a Web site's success. There's even great data to help you make your case to your boss that you've got a problem that needs to be addressed, and, a powerful chapter on Search Engine Optimization -- a chapter that distills down a great deal of complicated information into some very simple to follow steps that will get your site top rankings in search engines. I read this book, I loved this book, it was easy to read, and I have already sent copies to friends in the industry. It is that valuable. I recommend this book and I encourage you to own it -- you will not be disappointed. It is, hands down, the best book I have read on building or re-designing a Web site. Fredrick Marckini
Rating:
Summary: a book on a critical but often overlooked issue
Review: King's book focuses on an overlooked but critical aspect of website usability: response time. I think it's often overlooked by developers because they tend to have fast machines and fast connections, but even if individual response time is not a concern, the techniques discussed in the book could save money by requiring fewer servers and lower bandwidth requirements. There are two chapters on the psychology of performance, which might provide motivation or ammunition to convince
people who need convincing. Many of the chapters focus on methods to reduce the size of textual languages like
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Better and easier gains are obtained by configuring the server for compression, but many sites do not have that sort of control. The benefits of all these methods are covered well. Optimizing graphics is covered thoroughly, explaining the properties of different formats. Although it is mentioned in a summary, the practice of specifying
the height and width of images is not explained. It seems so obvious to many developers, but it's a disaster when not followed because the page can not be rendered until the sizes of all the images have been determined. Techniques for writing efficient code are applied to JavaScript, and there is good coverage of what takes a long time to execute on some browsers. The book has a web site: http://www.....com/ It shows figures, chapter summaries, links to resources, etc.
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