Vladimir Sedach

Have Emacs - Will Hack

July 14, 2010

Book review: Nicholas C. Zakas' High Performance JavaScript

Topic: Book reviews

Nicholas Zakas' High Performance JavaScript is a collection of tips and techniques for improving JavaScript web application performance. Although everything contained in the book has been published before, this is the first time the information has been compiled into one concise reference.

One of the highlights of the book is the discussion of reflows and interactions between JavaScript code and the browser UI. This area of JS-browser interaction is frequently overlooked by web developers, but is frequently responsible for perceived performance problems. Bringing this area of JS performance to popular attention may be book's most valuable contribution.

High Performance JavaScript is not a book to learn JavaScript from, and its weakest points are when it tries to review JS principles. The book attempts to provide explanations of JS semantics and implementation techniques, but the descriptions are inaccurate at best, wrong at worst. The explanation of JS scoping rules in particular is misleading and at times erroneous.

The book also includes dubious language-agnostic techniques like Duff's device and backward counting loops. Without guides to profiling, performance tuning principles, and an understanding of JS implementations, all of which the book lacks, this kind of advice will cause more harm than good in the hands of novice JS programmers, and its inclusion into an introductory book on JS performance tuning is questionable. The same can be said for the IE6-specific performance hacks mentioned throughout the book.

While the book has good coverage of contemporary JS profiling tools, it does not attempt to teach approaches to profiling and identifying bottlenecks. Also missing are tips on isolating sources of DOM access and reflow penalties.

Another thing High Performance JavaScript is not, is a guide to those working on JS implementations - there is no data on the JavaScript feature use and performance bottlenecks of contemporary JS web applications and libraries.

High Performance JavaScript is a concise collection of wide-ranging information on improving the performance of JavaScript web applications. However, it should be read with a solid understanding of JS and knowledge of general techniques for identifying and addressing performance problems. Recommended as a reference for anyone writing web applications.