Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By : Romain Picard
Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By: Romain Picard

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is central to many concurrent systems, but it’s famous for its steep learning curve, which makes most developers feel like they're hitting a wall. With this book, you will get to grips with reactive programming by steadily exploring various concepts This hands-on guide gets you started with Reactive Programming (RP) in Python. You will learn abouta the principles and benefits of using RP, which can be leveraged to build powerful concurrent applications. As you progress through the chapters, you will be introduced to the paradigm of Functional and Reactive Programming (FaRP), observables and observers, and concurrency and parallelism. The book will then take you through the implementation of an audio transcoding server and introduce you to a library that helps in the writing of FaRP code. You will understand how to use third-party services and dynamically reconfigure an application. By the end of the book, you will also have learned how to deploy and scale your applications with Docker and Traefik and explore the significant potential behind the reactive streams concept, and you'll have got to grips with a comprehensive set of best practices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Further reading

The description of the observer design pattern was originally documented in the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. You can read it to understand one of the foundations of ReactiveX. This book contains the description of all base design patterns used in object-oriented programming.

A detailed description of the reactor and proactor design patterns is available in the book Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects, Volume 2. This book contains information on concurrency, synchronization, and event handling.

The ReactiveX documentation is available online here: http://reactivex.io/documentation/operators.html. This documentation is generic to all programming languages, featuring marble diagrams of each operator. Refer to this documentation when looking for an operator. For each operator, it contains links to the specificity of each implementation.

The Reactive Manifesto is a great source of information to understand what is a reactive system and how to implement such a system: https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/.

You must read and learn The Observable Contract available here: http://reactivex.io/documentation/contract.html. It describes in a few words the rules that govern observables and observers. Once you are at ease with these concepts, you will be able to write and read ReactiveX code in an efficient way.