Since I’ve started writing books, I’ve always been the lead author and the main person behind the writing of the book. Trying to get a book out is a lot of work and trying to coordinate everything and write takes a lot of energy. It’s been fun, but a lot of work, and I decided that I needed a break. So when Steve Souders first approached me to write for his new book, Even Faster Web Sites, I was hesitant. After talking with him, he just wanted a single chapter and the idea of being a contributor rather than “the man” really grew on me.

Even Faster Web Sites is a continuation of Steve’s work from his first book, High Performance Web Sites, and focuses on more information for front end engineers looking to improve web performance. There’s a lot more focus on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in this book than in the first.

This is the first book that I’ve worked on as a contributor, and it’s great to be joined by some of the best in the business who also contributed: Douglas Crockford, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, Dylan Schiemann, Tony Gentilcore, Dion Almaer, and Ben Galbraith.

My chapter is entitled, Writing Efficient JavaScript, and it contains a lot of tidbits about JavaScript performance that you may not know (unless you read my blog regularly, of course). In writing this chapter, I did a lot of performance research across all major browser to really isolate the issues that slow JavaScript execution down. There’s a ton of details that I only had time to do because this chapter was my only priority – quite a difference from writing an entire book.

Steve was quite happy with my material and so invited me to a workshop, also entitled Writing Efficient JavaScript, at the Velocity conference in June. I hope to see you there. (Psst..you can get a 15% discount on registration by using the code vel09fsp. Consider it my gift to you.)

I want to thank Steve for the opportunity to work with him and this ultra-talented group of people. I’m very excited about the prospects for this book, which should be another “must-have” for serious web developers.