Learn WebRTC: How to Get Started on WebRTC Development [WebRTC Tutorial]

So you’ve been learning WebRTC development for a while, did a WebRTC Tutorial or even not at all. You might have checked out AppRTC or took a piece of code from github and forked it, running your own server (yay!). But now you’re feeling stuck, unable to become a serious WebRTC developer.

learning webrtc tutorial
WebRTC developers come in different shapes and sizes. They usually have one of two origin stories:

WebRTC developers were VoIP developers 10 years ago (that can mean anything from played with the configuration of an Asterisk installation to wrote their own RTP stack)
They are web developers (which can easily be implementing WordPress sites on top of premium themes, but can just as well be building backends used by the Facebooks of the world)
The challenge though is that WebRTC sits somewhere between these two very different disciplines that are VoIP and Web:

traditional voip and our web
Me? I’ve got a VoIP developer origin story. I wrote my own static memory, no-recursion implementation of an ASN.1 PER encoder/decoder. Dealt with scaling linearly a UDP/TCP sockets implementation on different operating systems. Handled multi-threading in C code. Low level stuff that most developers today don’t even grok. While these are great starting points, they don’t really offer any way of making the transition to WebRTC.

This isn’t about WebRTC. It is about understanding the different mindsets and approaches of developing VoIP products and developing Internet web applications. And it requires being able to learn new techniques and new ways of thinking.

While I won’t take you through that journey here, I can help you formulate a plan. In this article, we’ll explore together three things you can start doing today to make the jump from VoIP or Web to an experienced WebRTC developer.

What Don’t You Know?
The first thing you need to get a handle on is what you need to learn. Some might think that all you need to know to be a WebRTC developer is HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript. Taking a github project that makes use of WebRTC, install and run it on your own. That’s your WebRTC tutorial and you’re ready!

While that is certainly a good start, developing with WebRTC isn’t as easy as just learning a bit of JavaScript. Or Node.js for that matter.

To really call yourself a WebRTC developer, you’ll need to get a handle on a wide range of topics:

WebRTC APIs: That’s quite an understandable requ