Thursday, July 17, 2014

Book Review: 'Real Time Communication with WebRTC'

I am presenting the review of the book, 'Real Time Communication with WebRTC' by Salvatore Loreto and Simon Pietro Romano.
This book is an interesting mix of both Theory and Practical components of WebRTC, better explained to a layman as Voip or skype within a browser.
One of the things that could really affect you as a reader is the way this book is written - the theoritical fundamentals are interspread with code and practical advices. At times this makes a seemingly straightforward topic like socket.io painful to understand, but this is quite handy if you are stuck at a specific problem and need to go deeper into it.
As I am already having experience in developing applications that utilize WebRTC, it was a refreshing read that also explained a lot of theory details associated with this technology and the various possible ways in which peer-to-peer audio and video can be shared on a real time basis.
To give you an overview of this book, it gives a long introduction to the users and handling of user media(mic and webcam) from a HTML5 browser, before starting the discussion of the different design strategies used in a peer-to-peer connections. It then runs the user through an application from scratch to increase his confidence over the topics discussed and finishes with a discussion of advanced features of WebRTC API.
My greatest peeve in using this book was the lack of authority in the examples - some examples failed to execute with the firefox browser. Also, some of the routinely occuring errors could have been added as this technology is constantly evolving and it is not unexpected to find some code that might not be supported by future versions of browsers.
However, the browser based peer-to-peer communication is completely discussed and this book is one of the most comprehensive text on it at the moment.
Disclaimer: I have been provided a free copy of this book by OReilly under their Blogger review program.

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