Beginning NFC

Chapter 1. Introduction

This book started life innocently enough in an email from Brian to Tom in March 2011. Brian thought it would be a good idea to add a couple of lines to the second edition of another book about near field communication, Making Things Talk, which we were working on at the time. There was already a chapter on radio frequency identification (RFID) in the book, so how hard could it be? Two and a half years later, we’ve learned a lot about NFC along the way and picked up an excellent and knowledgeable collaborator, Don Coleman, author of the NFC plug-in for PhoneGap.

Even though NFC has a lot of potential, most of the material written about it so far hasn’t been written for the casual programmer. Everything out there assumed that if you wanted to know about NFC, you were prepared to do it from the silicon up. You had to understand the details of the various RFID specs involved, and you had to be prepared to write code that interpreted the byte stream from an NFC reader one byte at a time. While it’s useful to understand that, we figured NFC would see wider use if programmers could concentrate on what they were using it for, rather than the low-level details. Don’s PhoneGap library was the best tool we found to do just that. It lets you design NFC exchanges in the way we imagine the NFC forum designers intended: you think about the messages being exchanged and don’t worry about the rest.

Most of this book is written in that spirit. You’ll learn about the basics of ...