Last year was one in which I did a lot of research on performance, resulting in the Speed Up Your JavaScript blog post series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) as well as several talks, namely JavaScript Variable Performance at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup, Speed Up Your JavaScript at Google (video), and Writing Efficient JavaScript at Velocity. I was then asked my Steve Souders to contribute a chapter on JavaScript performance to his book, Even Faster Web Sites. While writing that chapter, I felt like I had far too little space to explore so wide of a topic.

Not long after that, I was approached by Havi Hoffman of the Yahoo! Developer Network to see if I would be interested in writing a book on JavaScript performance to be published by Yahoo! Press. You may be familiar with the first Yahoo! Press book, JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, but there’s also Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (Tom White) and Designing Social Interfaces (Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone). Each features invaluable knowledge from some of Yahoo!’s best and brightest. I have to admit that it was a dream of mine to write for Yahoo! since I first joined the company, and this was the perfect opportunity.

In March, High Performance JavaScript will officially hit the shelves (it’s available for pre-order now on Amazon). My vision for this book was to expand upon the chapter I wrote in Even Faster Web Sites and wanted very much to keep the overall statistics-driven approach that Steve had employed. But in order to make this book the absolute best that it could be, I also borrowed Steve’s idea and sought out some of the smartest engineers I know to contribute to the book. So this book features chapters written by the following:

Of course, there’s also five chapters written by me, making this a ten-chapter intensive look at JavaScript performance in the browser. I tried to make sure we covered all angles of the JavaScript lifecycle, from getting the code onto the page, executing the code, and deploying into production. I’m very, very excited about this book and the positive impact it can have on JavaScript developers. Don’t be fooled by faster JavaScript engines, JavaScript performance is going to continue to be important to understand for years to come. I hope you enjoy the book!