Dylan Schiemann

The book Even Faster Web Sites has been out for at least a month, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it! I was invited by the book’s primary author, Steve Souders, to write a chapter about Comet. I’ve generally been extremely hesitant to commit to any amount of book authoring as I don’t generally consider myself to be a very good or productive author. I actually sat down one day and wrote most of the chapter before formally agreeing to do it, as I didn’t want to flake or let Steve down before knowing what I was getting myself into!

I’m reasonably happy with Chapter 8, with one exception: I ran out of time to create figures and charts, so there are no visual explanations at all in the chapter. But as an introduction to the challenges of scaling with Comet, the chapter is good and hopefully adds a lot of value to the book. The editorial process was both more and less challenging than expected. Early on the suggestions were extensive, but it quickly became much easier to work with the various suggestions for improvement and converge on a much improved chapter.

I was much more excited to read the other chapters and learn some new performance optimization tricks. In general the book flows really well and doesn’t sound like a book written by seven different authors. Steve is excellent to work with as he’s very organized and is the type of guy that you don’t want to let down.

You can of course pick up the book through Amazon at the Ajax and Comet Store!