Talking Mobile Web Performance & RESS in Smashing Magazine’s “The Mobile Book”

Later this month or in early December you'll be able to read my contribution to Smashing Magazine's (@smashingmag) latest printed piece, "The Mobile Book." I'm honored to have been asked to join a fantastic line-up of writers and then given the freedom to write a chapter about a topic that I think is important in this age of the always connected device, web performance. The short description:

Although Responsive design per se has provided a great fundamental concept for designing mobile-optimized websites, the core ideas that make up these concepts pre-date the mobile revolution. In this chapter, Dave Olsen reviews what it takes to optimize mobile experiences in terms of performance. How do we keep responsive websites lightweight? What do we need to know about caching, lazy loading, latency? How can we start using RESS? Device detection or feature detection? Also, how do we develop and test our websites for performance? This chapter answers all these questions and more.

The contributors to the book are a Who's Who list of the leaders in the mobile web space. Smashing Magazine provides a handy Twitter list of authors but they are:

  • Jeremy Keith (@adactio) with the foreword
  • Peter Paul-Koch (@ppk) covering "What's Going on in Mobile?"
  • Stephanie Rieger (@stephanierieger) covering "The Future of Mobile"
  • Trent Walton (@TrentWalton) covering "Responsive Design Strategies"
  • Brad Frost (@brad_frost) covering "Responsive Design Patterns"
  • Dennis Kardys (@dkardys) covering "Hands On Design for Mobile (UX Perspective)"
  • Greg Nudelman (@designcaffeine) & Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) covering "Mobile UX Design Patterns"
  • Josh Clark (@globalmoxie) covering "Designing With Gestures and Touch"

    Smashing Magazine put together some more information on the book as well as more details on each chapter.

Many thanks to Vitaly Friedman for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the book. Also, thanks to him and the rest of the gang at Smashing Magazine for their work editing and proofing the chapter as well as gently shepherding me across the finish line. Thanks to Tim Kadlec (@tkadlec) for his quality technical edits.

If you pre-order the book you'll save 20% and get the eBook for free. Frankly, the book looks gorgeous (thanks to illustrations from Mike Kus (@mikekus)) and I know the content will be awesome so go order it today.  

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