High Performance JavaScript (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
This book is not for a beginner in JavaScript. It's intended more as a "best practices" guide for people who are already at least intermediate in the JavaScript skills. If you have a hard time wrapping your head around object-oriented JavaScript and closures, you probably aren't ready for this one, just yet.The section on regular expressions and how they work, under the hood, was nearly worth the price of admission by itself. I've spent many years working with Perl, had the college-level course in deterministic finite automata, etc. I thought I knew that part frontwards and backwards. I learned even more from this book.What are the biggest barriers to fast page loading? How you determine which ones are holding up the show with your latest project? It's all in here.How slow is "slow?" How long can the script engine tie up the CPU before users start perceiving it as "laggy?" It's in here. How do you do long-running tasks without running into that problem? Also in here.I learned plenty. After reading "JavaScript: the Good Parts" and "Eloquent JavaScript," this should be next on your list. I give it a 3.7. After three or four false starts, I was able to read this book until it was done. I think it took me a while to get into this book because in the beginning it felt like he spent forever just talking about scopes. It could also have been that back then the Nook (Color)? didn't support pdf books as well as it does today. Mostly meaning it didn't save what page you were on last. Every time you open the pdf, it started back at the beginning.After a few pages, and I was able to get into a groove with the book. I feel like it was a very thorough book in terms of giving you choices on how you can make your code more efficient and why. The only issue I had and he may have mentioned this but I missed it, is that in all his examples you had multiple var declarations in each example. That isn't very efficient. If the code was jslinted, it would have failed. He didn't talk about the different ways of declaring functions and which way is faster and why. Maybe it is out of the scope of this book and it falls under best coding practices. Either way, I would recommend this book.
What do You think about High Performance JavaScript (2010)?
Well written, easy to read and full of wonderful performance tips.
—Sucooldiva
only a three because the book is getting very dated.
—RAEKSOWNSNNs
Practical, well-written, and short.
—cri_contreras
