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This past Wednesday, I presented a front end performance session for how to make web sites work well.  I primarily covered the content from from Steve Souders Excellent book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers.

Not being a browser engineer, my knowledge is not the best in that area so probably the talk was a little dry.  We did spend a bunch of time talking about the the Sprite library just released to codeplex from the Asp.Net team.  That was  a great discussion!  I plan on talking more about that at my upcoming DevConnections talks in Orlando (very soon).  One interesting note was that there was a browser compatibility slide regarding sprites from Microsoft.  One of the attendees said “Peter, are you sure that Sprites are only supported on IE 8 and above?”.  I said I was sure that is what the document that I got from Microsoft said.  Well, I had several emails today with the Asp.Net team including the author of the document and though I don’t know the final answer, I’m sure that the Microsoft document was wrong on browser compatibility.  It seems that css and sprite support would work all the back to IE6.  When I know more, I’ll post a comment below with a link.  I’m sure Microsoft plans on updating that doc.

That’s it for now.  Below are some pictures from before the meeting.  I’d say that we had about 75 people in attendance.

The same authors who write the original Learning Ext JS are back and definitely with a winner here.  Just to start out, the book is about a third longer, has a new contributing author (Nigel White, aka “Animal” on the ExtJS Forums) and definitely packs a lot more content.  You get the feeling these guys took the feedback they got on the first book and went to town.

To start with, they have lots and lots of examples covering a lot more areas. There is a lot more architectural discussions that really help in building high end ExtJS applications. Chapter 13 for example is completely devoted to code reuse (extending ExtJS).  New features such as Ext.Direct are discussed extensively as well as the new graphics library (but don’t take that too seriously because it is being replaced with a non-flash version in ExtJS 4.0 which is coming out soon).

Overall, I give this book a solid A.  I’m even fortunate enough to get mine signed by Shea Frederick, one of the authors (see picture below).

Hope you get a chance to read this great book!