Book Image

Learning RxJava - Second Edition

By : Nick Samoylov, Thomas Nield
Book Image

Learning RxJava - Second Edition

By: Nick Samoylov, Thomas Nield

Overview of this book

RxJava is not just a popular library for building asynchronous and event-based applications; it also enables you to create a cleaner and more readable code base. In this book, you’ll cover the core fundamentals of reactive programming and learn how to design and implement reactive libraries and applications. Learning RxJava will help you understand how reactive programming works and guide you in writing your first example in reactive code. You’ll get to grips with the workings of Observable and Subscriber, and see how they are used in different contexts using real-world use cases. The book will also take you through multicasting and caching to help prevent redundant work with multiple Observers. You’ll then learn how to create your own RxJava operators by reusing reactive logic. As you advance, you’ll explore effective tools and libraries to test and debug RxJava code. Finally, you’ll delve into RxAndroid extensions and use Kotlin features to streamline your Android apps. By the end of this book, you'll become proficient in writing reactive code in Java and Kotlin to build concurrent applications, including Android applications.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundations of Reactive Programming in Java
5
Section 2: Reactive Operators
12
Section 3: Integration of RxJava applications
Appendix B: Functional Types
Appendix E: Understanding Schedulers

Thinking Reactively

We assume that you are fairly comfortable with Java and know how to use classes, interfaces, methods, properties, variables, static/non-static scopes, and collections. If you are not familiar with concurrency or multithreading, that is okay. RxJava makes these advanced topics much more accessible.

Have your favorite Java development environment ready, be it IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans, or any other environment of your choosing. We will be using IntelliJ IDEA, although it should not matter or have an impact on the examples in this book. We recommend that you have a project building framework such as Gradle or Maven, which we will explain how to use shortly.

In this chapter, before diving deeper into RxJava, we will cover some core topics:

  • A brief history of Reactive Extensions and RxJava
  • Thinking reactively
  • Leveraging RxJava
  • Setting up your first RxJava...