Chapter 1, Faster Web – Getting Started, defines what is the Faster Web by trying to better understand the formal aspects of it and sets out to understand how to measure performance and determine if a website or Web application is part of the Faster Web or not.
Chapter 2, Continuous Profiling and Monitoring, aims to help the reader learn how to install and configure profiling and monitoring tools that will help them easily optimize PHP code in a continuous integration (CI) and a continuous deployment (CD) environment.
Chapter 3, Harnessing the Power of PHP 7 Data Structures and Functions, gets the reader to learn how to harness PHP 7's performance boosts through most of its key optimizations. It also helps them explore how better understanding data structures and data types, and using simplified functions can help a PHP application's global performance along its critical execution path. In addition, it covers how it is best to avoid using inefficient structures, like most dynamic ones, in our PHP code, and how some functional techniques can be of immediate help when optimizing PHP code.
Chapter 4, Envisioning the Future with Asynchronous PHP, outlines how to cope with input and output (I/O) poor latency by learning about generators and asynchronous non-blocking code, multithreading with the POSIX Threads (pthreads) library and multitasking with the ReactPHP library.
Chapter 5, Measuring and Optimizing Database Performance, shows how to measure database performance, ranging from simple measurement techniques to advanced benchmarking tools.
Chapter 6, Querying Efficiently a Modern SQL Database, explains how to use Modern SQL techniques in order to optimize complex SQL queries.
Chapter 7, JavaScript and Danger-Driven Development, covers a few of JavaScript's best and worst parts, especially those that pertain to code efficiency and overall performance, and how a developer should always write safe, reliable and highly efficient JavaScript code, mostly by avoiding “danger-driven development”.
Chapter 8, Functional JavaScript, features how JavaScript is becoming more and more a functional language and how this programming paradigm will be a vector for performance in the near future by taking a quick look at upcoming language features that will help improve performance of JavaScript applications.
Chapter 9, Boosting a Web Server’s Performance, looks at what the HTTP/2 protocol is all about and how the SPDY project made it possible, how PHP-FPM and OPcache can help you boost the performance of your PHP scripts, how to use ESI technology by setting up a Varnish Cache server, how to use client-side caching and how other Faster Web tools can help you boost a web server's overall performance.
Chapter 10, Going Beyond Performance, shows how, when everything seems to have been fully optimized, we can still go beyond performance by better understanding the principles behind UI design when it comes to the perception of performance.
