I'd start with the MS documentation, it's pretty good. They're usually called 'indexed views', so that search term should get you a lot of reading.

Top and Rowcount both work without sorts, however when you use them such, there's no guarantee as to which rows you get, and the rows you get can be different...

Just don't take any log backups. Those must only be done by the log shipping process. (you can and should copy those log backups elsewhere for safety, once they've been...

Full backups will not affect log shipping (neither will differential backups) as they do not break or otherwise interfere with the log chain

If you're using the procedure in an INSERT INTO ... EXEC... Then you need to be very careful. You can't add more resultsets to the procedure, as they're break the...

It loops over one table and inserts the values, one by one, into another table. That's not hard to replace with a single insert.
You get better at programming...

You could start by getting rid of the unnecessary cursor.

Can you post the queries that are slow, along with their actual execution plans? The ones against the full table that take ~5 min.