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.

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.