Book Review: WebRTC Integrator's Guide

Introduction

• Today I am going to Review a Book which has been published by Packt Publishing.
• The Book is WebRTC Integrator's Guide.
• The Author of this book is Altanai.

Table of Contents *

Who This Book Is For ? *

• This book is for programmers who want to learn about real-time communication and utilize the full potential of WebRTC.
• It is assumed that you have working knowledge of setting up a basic telecom infrastructure as well as basic programming and scripting knowledge.

What You Will Learn From This Book ? *

• Understand the purpose of Media APIs in the WebRTC media stack
• Discover more about WebRTC and next generation communication networks
• Learn how to run simple WebRTC clients with the default peer-to-peer behavior
• Run WebRTC calls over a WebSocket protocol using a WebSocket signaling server
• Integrate WebRTC with old networks.
• Learn best practices to build up a dynamic web project with support for WebRTC calls
• Explore the usefulness of the interconversion of protocols and the transcoding of codecs with WebRTC

Pros

• WebRTC lets us make calls right from a web page without any plugin. This was made possible using media APIs of the browser to fetch user media, WebSocket fortransportation, and HTML5 to render the media on the web page. Thus, WebRTC is an evolved form of WebSocket communication.
• This is a very new area for me and I have read the 1^st chapter of this book. It's named as "Running WebRTC with and without SIP".
• It's awesome. So I'm going to share the thoughts of mine about this chapter with you. Let's start it.
• In this chapter, I learned that a WebRTC communication process is divided into two parts. First one is signaling, where the session setup and teardown is agreed to, and the second one is media transactions, which deals with the actual RTP streams that contain voice/video/data that the user has sent.
• I saw how to program the three basic APIs of WebRTC media stack, namely, getUserMedia, RTCPeerConnection, and DataChannel.
• The Running WebRTC without SIP section described signaling done over JSON via XMLHttpRequest using Node.js as the intermediately signaling server to connect the peers and prepare for the media flow.
• The next section, Running WebRTC with SIP, listed the libraries or WebRTC clients that use SIP over WebSocket to take care of the signaling between WebRTC peers.
• I have to say that the author has explained the concepts in very simple and easy to learn manner with the nice colourful images and examples with the step by step explanations.
• I have learned a lot about the WebRTC world by using this chapter.

Cons

• The only complaint that I have about this book is with the formatting of the code snippets. Currently it's in black and white (mono) way. As a reader, I would like to have a color syntax for the code snippets. If so, it'll give a huge value for Packt's books.

Reference *

• * I got the content from the WebRTC Integrator's Guide's Home page.

Do You Need to Buy this Book ?

• Packt Publishing

• Amazon

Conclusion

• I would like to recommend this book to all the JavaScript developers who want to learn about real-time communication and utilize the full potential of WebRTC library.
• I have to put in a special thanks for Packt Publishing, who gave me this opportunity to review this book. Packt Publishing is doing an outstanding job in the software developer world by publishing this kind of books in very specific areas. Keep up the good work.
• Thanks to the author Altanai as well for writing this kind of awesome book. Keep up the good work.