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.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Packt Ten Year Celebration Campaign - Packt Publishing

Packt Publishing launches an exciting campaign to celebrate 10 years and is offering all eBooks and Videos at just $10 each for 10 days (Till 5th of July). 

This publication has been a boon for open source frameworks - by providing a well formed additional documentation/how-tos for a specific technology. 


Press Release:

Packt’s celebrates 10 years with a special $10 offer

This month marks 10 years since Packt Publishing embarked on its mission to deliver effective 
learning and information services to IT professionals. In that time it’s published over 2000 titles and helped projects become household names, awarding over $400,000 through its Open Source Project Royalty Scheme.

To celebrate this huge milestone, from June 26th $10 each for 10 days – this promotion covers every title and customers can stock up on as many copies as they like until July 5th Dave Maclean, Managing Director explains ‘From our very first book published back in 2004, we’ve always focused on giving IT professionals the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done. 

As we look forward to the next 10 years, everything we do here at Packt will focus on helping those IT professionals, and the wider world, put software to work in innovative new ways. 
We’re very excited to take our customers on this new journey with us, and we would like to thank them for coming this far with this special 10-day celebration, when we’ll be opening up our comprehensive range of titles for $10 each. 

If you’ve already tried a Packt title in the past, you’ll know this is a great opportunity to explore what’s new and maintain your personal and professional development. If you’re new to Packt, then now is the time to try our extensive range – we’re confident that in our 2000+ titles you’ll find the
knowledge you really need , whether that’s specific learning on an emerging technology or the key skills to keep you ahead of the competition in more established tech.’ 

More information is available at www.packtpub.com/10years 


bit.ly/1ohwJwx