Along this theme of knowledge, there is the lost art of tuning your page and content sizes such that they fit in as few packets as possible to speed up transmission. The front page of Google for example famously fitted in a single packet (I don't know if that's still the case). There is a brilliant book that used to be a bit of a bible in the world of web sysadmin from the Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team which is less relevant these days but interesting to understand the era.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-web/97...

I'll add some perf suggestions:

High Performance Websites and Even Faster Websites http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529307.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596522315.do

These two on website performance are good, though they're a bit dated (pre http2 etc).

High Performance Browser Networking http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028048.do

I never fully read this one but it's really good, probably required reading if you're serious about webdev

CSS: BEM/OOCSS/SMACSS methodologies, they make you think critically about the structure of you styles. Harry Roberts does good writeups on maintainable css.

I second Don't Make Me Think and I also liked Eloquent Javascript (that zoo has a bunch of new exotic animals since, so I don't know if it's the best bet. It's a fun book though)

One can write a book about literally anything. But besides that, it already "required" a book – at least two of them in fact, both published before Google even announced SPDY: "High Performance Web Sites" [1] in 2007 and its sequel "Even Faster Web Sites" [2] in 2009, both by Steve Souders.

What are they about? Essentially, optimizing your HTTP responses for the ways in which actual web browsers make HTTP requests. Any web performance analysis tool worth using (like YSlow and PageSpeed – both of which Steve Souders was involved in btw) recommended the practices outlined in those books.

So, no. I don't think a new book with updated practices says anything about the protocol. The optimization tips from this book will simply become widespread common knowledge the same way they did in the past.

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529307.do [2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596522315.do