The introduction chapter does an overview of the Wayland environment from the hardware to the userspace and explains what is packaged into Wayland. Wayland.xml defines the high-level protocol and wayland-scanner generates the glue code from this xml.

Chapter 2 explains how requests and events work under that protocol.
Surfaces is kinda what Windows and Drawables are for X11, there is a “damage” request that is similar to the “exposed” event on X11. The damage request is a recurring example through the book. Wayland is an asynchronous protocol. Requests are accumulated until commit.

Chapter 3 deals with libwayland and its implementation. It explains how wayland-scanner works and how it generates client and server headers and the glue code from the xml protocol. It also explains how objects are referred by clients and the server.

In chapter 4 we are taught how to connect to the display, which is similar to a X11 display. We create our first client, a simple program that just connects to the display. We are also taught how to implement the event loop.