Speed Up Your Site (Buy it at Amazon.com), by Andrew King, is a great addition to any web developers library. I heartily recommend it for the depth and breadth of the topics covered. This is another great book in the catalog of New Riders collection of programming and web development books.

By using the techniques in this book I have been able to really speed up the client side code for multiple projects and have gotten great feedback from users. The section of JavaScript optimization alone is worth the price of the book. Areas I have yet to explore in optimization include graphics and Flash work. I don’t do any Flash, but am considering trying that out in the future (for some things) and the graphics that I use on sites are often pretty sparse to help increase load speeds. Kudos to Andy for the great book that will be off the shelf until it’s completely committed to memory.

I just finished reading The Three Musketeers (buy this on Amazon.com) and am rather impressed. While it was not quite as good as The Count ofMonte Cristo, it was pretty darn good. It had a few parts that were surely more sexual than TCoMC but compared to any modern literature I’ve read, they were merely innuendo. I’ve had to read this book slower than my other reading because I’ve been busy with various other work related things, but I made sure I had time to read it because I like to have some play time at home, alone.

The characters in this book are interesting and the ending was at the very least a surprise. Threads were being woven through out the book that I didn’t see coming together at all, and the character often called ‘Milady’ is just astonishing. After you read TCoMC you should read this one. I assume we’ll go to the library soon where I’ll pick up The Man in the Iron Mask.

I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo (Buy it at Amazon.com) last night at 12:40 or so. Great book, but I’m incredibbly tired now (that’s a lie, I’m not that tired, but I will be this afternoon). The ending had me realing, I was just wondering “what?!” Not because it was a bad ending, it just caught me off-guard, which is fabulous. In the end you see that even Edmond, who is after revenge, is still susceptable to error and his actions have a weighty consequence. Very good reading and if you don’t want to buy it, it is available at Project Gutenberg as a text file. Also, you could get it at your local library. Whatever the case, after reading this I want to read some more fiction. Jessica and I are considering the ‘Bourne Identity’ since we liked that movie as well.