- Hardcover
- Publisher: Tandem Library (Jan 2003)
- ISBN-10: 061391712X
- ISBN-13: 978-0613917124
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I first got this book I wondered just how much it could cover that I didn't already know.... wow, was I suprised!
I generally read a book's first chapter and then pick and choose the parts I think would be useful, however I read this one from cover to cover in a matter of days. I then spent the next week or so implementing the great tips and tricks I'd learned from it across my sites.
What Andy King doesn't know about this subject could be written on a postage stamp, from Lilliput. From image compression, to movie optimisation to code reduction to CSS to Apache settings and many many more, this book covers it all, in detail.
I don't think I have another book with so many folded corners and highlighted lines.
I generally read a book's first chapter and then pick and choose the parts I think would be useful, however I read this one from cover to cover in a matter of days. I then spent the next week or so implementing the great tips and tricks I'd learned from it across my sites.
What Andy King doesn't know about this subject could be written on a postage stamp, from Lilliput. From image compression, to movie optimisation to code reduction to CSS to Apache settings and many many more, this book covers it all, in detail.
I don't think I have another book with so many folded corners and highlighted lines.
If you want to make your site faster, find some great resources and learn just how little you know on this subject I highly recommend this book.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I bought this book I was realistically just hoping for a few tips to help minimise the size of my web pages. Yet the title really undersells the contents, because (graphic design excepted) this book is nothing short of a complete, utterly practical guide to how to build a fast and professional web site. It begins by explaining why a fast loading site is so important to usability, and then launches into chapter after chapter of DETAILED how-to tips on the correct use of HTML, XHTML, CSS(including CSS2), Javascript, minimising GIFs/JPEGs/PNGs/audio and video files - the advice is totally professional and includes advice on what software is available for any given purpose as well as web addresses for further information. (The author even gives advice on what type of digital camera is best for putting video on the web!) The last third of the book then explains how to optimise your site for the search engines, continues with detailed consideration of server-side techniques for compressing webpages even further, and concludes - unusually, but helpfully - with a large chunk (23 pages!) from the first chapter of the book "Search Engine Visibility" by Shari Thurow.
The impression throughout is that a top-notch web pro has simply sat down at his keyboard and "spilled the beans" (Karl Moore style) on all the intricate and difficult pro tips that will doubtless have taken him half-a-lifetime to acquire. The old browser/new browser and I/E/Netscape compatibility issues are also addressed in detail throughout so intermediate level site-builders should be able to implement the majority of these (code-based) tips. This is probably the best computer book I have ever bought.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Usually reviews are a good for steering my purchases, this time I ended up way off course.
22 Nov 2005
Format:Paperback
I can't argue with the strengths of the book which is detailed in the number of excellent reviews here, as they are all true. I bought the book based on those reviews, and while they are true, I still feel cheated.
In today's world, where "standards based" coding is becoming more prevalent and adherance to the W3C standards for HTML coding is being recommended, this book just grated on me. While there is a great deal of great information, there are also a large number of "gotchas" to watch out for as well.
The book proposes to use HTML tags without their corresponding closing tags, not to use required elements whenever possible, avoid using quotes in HTML tags, and many other ways of creating "non-valid" code. This will "optimize" your code a bit more by reducing the characters in it, but it will also create problems for you in the future.
In summary, while the book does give alot of good information, it often steers you away from standard code. If you are unsure what is considered "standard" and required for creating valid XHTML/CSS, you are best served skipping this book as it will teach you to create invalid code. If you know enough about XHTML/CSS to ignore those parts, it's a great book.
In today's world, where "standards based" coding is becoming more prevalent and adherance to the W3C standards for HTML coding is being recommended, this book just grated on me. While there is a great deal of great information, there are also a large number of "gotchas" to watch out for as well.
The book proposes to use HTML tags without their corresponding closing tags, not to use required elements whenever possible, avoid using quotes in HTML tags, and many other ways of creating "non-valid" code. This will "optimize" your code a bit more by reducing the characters in it, but it will also create problems for you in the future.
In summary, while the book does give alot of good information, it often steers you away from standard code. If you are unsure what is considered "standard" and required for creating valid XHTML/CSS, you are best served skipping this book as it will teach you to create invalid code. If you know enough about XHTML/CSS to ignore those parts, it's a great book.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Shorter html and css at all costs?
13 Dec 2005
Format:Paperback
Description
The book has six parts.
The first part says that because web users are willing to wait for at most eight seconds and many use a 56.6Kbps modem, web pages should be at most 30KB in size.
The second part lists tricks how to write shorter html.
The third part lists tricks how to write shorter css and javascript.
The fourth part discusses graphics and multimedia optimization.
The fifth part explains methodically how to make your web come up high in search engines.
The sixth part details some server-side tricks for Apache.
Comment
This book concentrates almost exclusively on sending fewer bytes from the server to the browser. It gives a large collection of tricks how to write shorter html, xhtml, css, and javascript. Some of these tricks are useful. Others however go against standards, and some seriously go against maintainability. I'd be reluctant to give this book to my team. One may be tempted into shaving off bytes, spending a big effort and yet producing unmaintainable code. Unless one has a strong sense of relevance, one can be caught up in technical dispersion.
If you want to send fewer bytes, standard gzip-compression is far better than eliminating line-breaks and indentation.
The book does not go into server-side programming. It is oriented towards optimization of static pages.
With this orientation, King makes some bad recommendations. For example, he recommends writing javascript without comments, rather then recommending server-side comments that are not sent to the browser.
The book predates AJAX-like techniques.
Who should read it?
The book is useful for the person that writes the html that will be sent to the browser, if that person has a good sense of relevance.
The book has six parts.
The first part says that because web users are willing to wait for at most eight seconds and many use a 56.6Kbps modem, web pages should be at most 30KB in size.
The second part lists tricks how to write shorter html.
The third part lists tricks how to write shorter css and javascript.
The fourth part discusses graphics and multimedia optimization.
The fifth part explains methodically how to make your web come up high in search engines.
The sixth part details some server-side tricks for Apache.
Comment
This book concentrates almost exclusively on sending fewer bytes from the server to the browser. It gives a large collection of tricks how to write shorter html, xhtml, css, and javascript. Some of these tricks are useful. Others however go against standards, and some seriously go against maintainability. I'd be reluctant to give this book to my team. One may be tempted into shaving off bytes, spending a big effort and yet producing unmaintainable code. Unless one has a strong sense of relevance, one can be caught up in technical dispersion.
If you want to send fewer bytes, standard gzip-compression is far better than eliminating line-breaks and indentation.
The book does not go into server-side programming. It is oriented towards optimization of static pages.
With this orientation, King makes some bad recommendations. For example, he recommends writing javascript without comments, rather then recommending server-side comments that are not sent to the browser.
The book predates AJAX-like techniques.
Who should read it?
The book is useful for the person that writes the html that will be sent to the browser, if that person has a good sense of relevance.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
An ESSENTIAL Book for Any Serious Web Designer
10 Mar 2003
Format:Paperback
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.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
