Book Image

Learning RxJava

By : Nield
Book Image

Learning RxJava

By: Nield

Overview of this book

RxJava is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using Observable sequences for the JVM, allowing developers to build robust applications in less time. Learning RxJava addresses all the fundamentals of reactive programming to help readers write reactive code, as well as teach them an effective approach to designing and implementing reactive libraries and applications. Starting with a brief introduction to reactive programming concepts, there is an overview of Observables and Observers, the core components of RxJava, and how to combine different streams of data and events together. You will also learn simpler ways to achieve concurrency and remain highly performant, with no need for synchronization. Later on, we will leverage backpressure and other strategies to cope with rapidly-producing sources to prevent bottlenecks in your application. After covering custom operators, testing, and debugging, the book dives into hands-on examples using RxJava on Android as well as Kotlin.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Thinking Reactively

It is assumed you are fairly comfortable with Java and know how to use classes, interfaces, methods, properties, variables, static/nonstatic scopes, and collections. If you have not done concurrency or multithreading, that is okay. RxJava makes these advanced topics much more accessible.

Have your favorite Java development environment ready, whether it is Intellij IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans, or any other environment of your choosing. I will be using Intellij IDEA, although it should not matter or impact the examples in this book. I recommend that you have a build automation system as well such as Gradle or Maven, which we will walk through shortly.

Before we dive deep into RxJava, we will cover some core topics first:

  • A brief history of Reactive Extensions and RxJava
  • Thinking reactively
  • Leveraging RxJava
  • Setting up your first RxJava project
  • Building your first reactive applications
  • Differences between RxJava 1.0 and RxJava 2.0