> Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.I agree with the general thrust of this. But it's worth pointing out that often the easiest way to prove where a bottleneck is (or at least) isn't, is to try an optimization and see if it helps. I like profiling tools immensely, and this kind of trial an error optimization doesn't scale well to widespread performance problems. But there's something to be said for doing a couple of quick optimizations as tracer bullets to see if you get lucky and find the problem before bringing in the big guns.
The last three rules bug me. I wish we had a name for aphorisms that perfectly encapsulate an idea once you already have the wisdom to understand it, but that don't actually teach anything. They may help you remember a concept—a sort of aphoristic mnemonic—but don't illuminate it. The problem with these is that espousing them is more a way of bragging ("look how smart I am for understanding this!") than really helping others.
For example:
> Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.
OK, well what are the "right" data structures? The answer is "the ones that let you perform the operations you need to perform easily or efficiently". So you still need to know what the code is doing too. And the algorithms are only "self-evident" because you chose data structures expressely to give you the luxury of using simple algorithms.