Introduction

WebRTC For The Curious #

This book was created by WebRTC implementers to share their hard-earned knowledge with the world. WebRTC For The Curious is an Open Source book written for those that are always looking for more. This book doesn’t settle for abstraction.

This book is all about protocols and APIs, and will not be talking about any software in particular. We attempt to summarize RFCs and get all undocumented knowledge into one place. This book is not a tutorial, and will not contain much code.

WebRTC is a wonderful technology, but it is difficult to use. This book is vendor agnostic, and we have tried to remove any conflicts of interest.

Who this book is for: #

  • Developers who don’t even know what WebRTC solves, and want to learn more.
  • Someone who is already building with WebRTC, but wants to know more beyond the APIs.
  • Established developers who need help debugging.
  • WebRTC implementer who needs clarification on a specific part.

Designed for multiple readings #

This book is designed to be read multiple times. Each chapter is self-contained, so you can jump to any part of the book and not be lost.

Each chapter aims to answer a single question, with three levels of information:

  • What needs to be solved?
  • How do we solve it? (Including technical details about the solution.)
  • Where to learn more.

Each chapter doesn’t assume prior knowledge. You can start at any point in the book and begin learning. This book will also recommend resources to go and learn more. Other books cover individual topics in much greater depth. This book aims to teach you the entire system, at the cost of expert level details.

Freely available and privacy respecting #

This book is available on GitHub and WebRTCforTheCurious.com. It is licensed in a way that you can use it however you think is best. You can also download the book in its current version as an ePub or PDF file.

This book is written by individuals, for individuals. It is vendor agnostic, so we will not make recommendations that could be a conflict of interest.

The website will not use analytics or tracking.

Get involved! #

We need your help! This book is entirely developed on GitHub and is still being written. We encourage readers to open issues with questions on things we didn’t do a good job of covering yet.

License #

This book is available under the CC0 license. The authors have waived all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. You may use this work however you want and no attribution is required.