High Performance JavaScript (Build Faster Web Application Interfaces) at Dominant Systems Book Store

If you're like most developers, you rely heavily on JavaScript to build interactive and quick-responding web applications. The problem is that all of those lines of JavaScript code can slow down your apps. This book reveals techniques and strategies to help you eliminate performance bottlenecks during development. You'll learn how to improve execution time, downloading, interaction with the DOM, page life cycle, and more.

Yahoo! frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas and five other JavaScript experts -- Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Steven Levithan, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney -- demonstrate optimal ways to load code onto a page, and offer programming tips to help your JavaScript run as efficiently and quickly as possible. You'll learn the best practices to build and deploy your files to a production environment, and tools that can help you find problems once your site goes live.

Identify problem code and use faster alternatives to accomplish the same task
Improve scripts by learning how JavaScript stores and accesses data
Implement JavaScript code so that it doesn't slow down interaction with the DOM
Use optimization techniques to improve runtime performance
Learn ways to ensure the UI is responsive at all times
Achieve faster client-server communication
Use a build system to minify files, and HTTP compression to deliver them to the browser

Customer Reviews & Comments
This book is a good reference on how to optimize JavaScript applications and also an interesting read in case you want to know how things work "under the hood". Many of the techniques presented also works for other programming languages (and are well-known performance tricks) and can be used without increasing too much the code complexity, which is a huge gain, you're not just becoming a better JavaScript developer but also a better developer. One thing that should be clear is that this book is NOT intended for BEGINNERS, since it already presumes that you have a good knowledge and experience with JS programming. If you already read Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (also written by Zakas), High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers and Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers you will find that some of the techniques were already present on those books, so if you're up-to-date with the new technologies/tools and been researching about the subject probably you already know a good part of what this book has to teach, nevertheless it still a nice and interesting read since it explains how the JavaScript engines work and why those techniques are faster, the fact that it is concise is a big plus too. The book has some typo mistakes (which doesn't affect the understanding) and some of the line graphs (used to show browsers benchmark) are hard to read since all the lines look the same (as of 1st Edition). I strongly recommend this book to any intermediate to advanced developer who wants to learn how to improve the overall performance of JavaScript applications since it is a concise and accurate compilation of best practices, even if you know a lot about the subject you may learn a few new tricks or understand a little bit better why it works...

Back To Top