In the spirit of the true high-performance non-blocking asynchronous delivery, we'll have the Web Performance Daybook volume 2 published before volume 1. I hope you'll enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed working on it and rubbing (virtual) shoulders with some of the brightest people in our industry.
Back in December of 2009 I wanted to give an overview of the web performance optimization (WPO) discipline. I decided on a self-imposed deadline of an-article-a-day from December 1st to 24th: the format of an advent calendar similar to 24ways.org. As it turned out, 24 articles in a row was quite a challenge and so I was happy and grateful to accept the offers for help from a few friends from the industry: Christian Heilmann (Mozilla), Eric Goldsmith (AOL) and two posts from Ara Pehlivanian (Yahoo!).
The articles were warmly accepted by the community and then on the following year, in December 2010, the calendar was already something people were looking forward to reading. The calendar also got a new home at http://calendar.perfplanet.com as a subdomain of the “Planet Performance†feed aggregator. And this time around also more people were willing to help. Developers of all around our industry were willing to contribute their time, to share and spread their knowledge, announce new tools, and this way create a much better set of 24 articles than a single person could. This is what soon will become volume 1 of the series of Daybooks.
Then came December 2011 and we had so much good content and enthusiasm that we kept going past December 24, all the way to December 31st and even publishing 2 articles on the last day. This is the content that you have in your hands in a book format as Web Performance Daybook vol.2.
Our WPO community is young, small, but growing, and in need of nourishment in the form of community building events such as the advent calendar. That's why it was exciting to have the opportunity to collaborate on this title with O'Reilly and all 32 authors. I'm really happy with the result and I know that both volumes will serve as a reference and introduction to performance tools, research, techniques and approaches for years to come. There's always the risk with outdated content in offline technical publications but I see references to the calendar articles in the latest conferences today all the time, so I'm confident this knowledge is to remain fresh for quite a while and some of it is even destined to become timeless.
Enjoy the book, prepare to learn from the brightest in the industry and, most of all, be ready to make the Web a better place for all of us!
Authors in order of appearance:
- Patrick Meenan
- Nicholas Zakas
- Guy Podjarny
- Stoyan Stefanov
- Tim Kadlec
- Brian Pane
- Josh Fraser
- Steve Souders
- Betty Tso
- Israel Nir
- Marcel Duran
- Éric Daspet
- Alois Reitbauer
- Matthew Prince
- Buddy Brewer
- Alexander Podelko
- Estelle Weyl
- Aaron Peters
- Tony Gentilcore
- Matthew Steele
- Bryan McQuade
- Tobie Langel
- Billy Hoffman
- Joshua Bixby
- Sergey Chernyshev
- JP Castro
- Pavel Paulau
- David Calhoun
- Nicole Sullivan
- James Pearce
- Tom Hughes-Croucher
- Dave Artz
Or, as I like to call them, the sultans of speed!
(So far expected publication date is Velocity US, end this month, fingers crossed!)
Oh, and authors' royalties are donated to a charity and a WPO charity at that. (Stay tuned for the announcement.) So feel free to get a copy for everyone in your org, it's for a good cause.
