Peter Corlett: December 2007 Archives

High Performance Web Sites is a book about tuning web sites to make them load faster. It presents fourteen rules to follow to make a web site load faster and is essentially a dead-tree version of the "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site" page on the Yahoo! Developer Network. But now you've read the web site, do you need the book?

Bookmooch was a fine tip-off. The premise is simple: earn points by posting people books, and spend those points on receiving books. It works too!

So far I've cleared a half-dozen of the more unreadable tomes off my shelf because some more brave souls reckon they can penetrate the turgid prose. It costs £1.52 to post one or two typical paperback books second class, so £7.60 later the damn things were finally out of my life.

Now, obviously I could have just thrown the books away, but instead I've earned points that can be exchanged for books. A quick cut and paste of my Amazon recommendations into my Bookmooch wishlist, and two books pop out. So a quick click-click and they're in the post at no cost to me. Rather surprisingly, given the post around here, they arrive too.

So that's £7.60 spent to get a couple of books that normally cost about £8 each, and the option to claim four more that might take my fancy. Result!