Alan Johnston and Dan Burnett have updated their excellent “The WebRTC book”, the full title is “WebRTC: APIs and RTCWEB Protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web.”  It was only back in September 2012 I reviewed the first version of their excellent book, and much has happened, which is all captured in this second edition.  By the way, Dan will be presenting on WebRTC at the Telecom Application Developer Summit (TADS) on Friday 22nd November 2013, and at the SDP Global Summit post-conference workshop on Telecom APIs on Friday 20th September 2013.

This edition begins with an introduction to WebRTC and discusses what is new about it. The unique aspects of WebRTC peer-to-peer media flows are explored, and Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal are explained. They have lots of new material, including new chapters on signaling, privacy and security.  They discuss the working documents and finalized documents that together comprise the WebRTC standards-in-progress in both the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).   And finally discuss the current state of deployment in popular browsers, which surprisingly hasn’t changed that much over the past year compared to the standard. At the end of this weblog is the content list of the book.  They have full client and server code for their WebRTC demo.  Also, in the area of security, Alan has come up with a new way to use ZRTP with WebRTC to provide protection against attackers.

Whether you’re a developer looking to understand what WebRTC can do for you, or a marketing person wishing to gain a deeper understanding of an important industry development, or a strategy person digging deeper into what WebRTC is and isn’t, this is the book for you.  Easily accessible and frankly presented, with no hyperbole just the facts, the book continues to provides the best review of a standard that will in time transform the web by making real-time communications an intrinsic part of the experience.  The WebRTC Book remains one of my few “constant companion books” as its on my Kindle and on my desk.

1 Introduction to Web Real-Time Communications
2 How to Use WebRTC
3 WebRTC Peer-to-Peer Media
4 WebRTC Signaling
5 W3C WebRTC Documents
6 WebRTC Protocols
7 Demo Application Code
8 IETF WebRTC Documents
9 IETF Related RFC Documents
10 Security and Privacy
11 WebRTC Implementations
Appendix A The W3C Standards Process
Appendix B The IETF Standards Process
Appendix C Glossary
Appendix D Supplementary Reading and Sources