Book Image

Reactive Programming for .NET Developers

Book Image

Reactive Programming for .NET Developers

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is an innovative programming paradigm focused on time-based problem solving. It makes your programs better-performing, easier to scale, and more reliable. Want to create fast-running applications to handle complex logics and huge datasets for financial and big-data challenges? Then you have picked up the right book! Starting with the principles of reactive programming and unveiling the power of the pull-programming world, this book is your one-stop solution to get a deep practical understanding of reactive programming techniques. You will gradually learn all about reactive extensions, programming, testing, and debugging observable sequence, and integrating events from CLR data-at-rest or events. Finally, you will dive into advanced techniques such as manipulating time in data-flow, customizing operators and providers, and exploring functional reactive programming. By the end of the book, you'll know how to apply reactive programming to solve complex problems and build efficient programs with reactive user interfaces.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Reactive Programming for .NET Developers
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Discrete and continuous components


Discrete and continuous components are fundamental to better understand FRP. From the first introduction, one of the main axes is exactly the distinction between discrete and continuous. In the previous chapter, we analyzed many aspects related to these two components, but we never mentioned them. If we had so, then the argument could have been too complicated and theoretical.

By definition, discrete and continuous components can be described as the two main characteristics which FRP provides. In other words, they are the basics to apply time flow in our application or to improve our scenario of use.

We previously discussed the execution of the following function:

List.map (fun x -> x ** x) 

While doing so, we introduced the concept of time flow to underline that every execution of the mathematical function power occurs step by step.

In the example, it seems that this scenario is continuous, because for every input value of the list, a new output value...