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

Simple to use doesn't mean simple to create. Even a simple and small code base doesn't mean the think-process preceding the actual programming was simple.

It requires a small section in a book to tell you how to undo all the tricks you've had to learn in the past 10 years to make an HTTP/1.1 website fast. Most of that is irrelevant and detrimental with HTTP/2, which is kind of the point. You'll get the benefits of those optimizations without having to do anything special to get them.

That book is also a phenomenal resource on the performance of all things web-related, so you should check it out regardless of any concerns you have about HTTP/2.