Book Review: WebRTC with Salvatore & Simon

If you are looking for the friendliest book on WebRTC, then you should definitely look at Real-Time Communication with WebRTC by Slvatore & Simon. There aren't many WebRTC books, but this is starting to slowly change. A new bookwas released recently. This one on O'reilly.

Real-Time Communication with WebRTC by Salvatore Loreto & Simon Pietro Romano

When I saw this book is coming out, I immediately reached out to Salvatore asking to get a copy and read it. Although I have never met or interacted with Salvatore before, he agreed. I took the time last week to read this book from cover to cover, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Real-Time Communication with WebRTC is written in a unique voice - one usually not found in technical books (at least not the ones I've read). It was as if I was sitting in a coffee shop with Salvatore & Simon and we had a long and interesting chat. It is hard to say why, but this book is personable. In terms of content, it gets the job done:

• It explains WebRTC, goes over media acquisition, peer connection and data channel APIs and flows
• It touches some of the differences between browser implementations of WebRTC
• It builds up a full WebRTC based service throughout the book

I can only come up with three complaints about this book:

1. The screenshots taken with Simon's headshot in them - would be nice if he'd smile. He looks very serious in them
2. WebRTC is a moving target. The book rightly states in a lot of places the current status of browser support for various features, but fails to state the current version number of said browsers. Something that would be useful a year down the road
3. This is something I see with all the books so far, but I think it is time to complain about it: this book takes the easy route of using Node.js and explaining the signaling backend, but ignores or rather touches only superfluously at NAT traversal backend requirements - setting up and using STUN/TURN servers

All in all, this is one great book. If you are looking as a developer to learn WebRTC in a way that enables you to use it without getting too deep into the details, then this is definitely the book for you.