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

To get the most out of this book

Read the chapters systematically and do not rush. The material presented is very condensed and contains a lot of detail. Clone the source code repository (see below) and run all the code samples that demonstrate the topics discussed. To get up to speed in programming, there is nothing better than executing the examples provided, modifying them, and then trying your own ideas.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

  1. Log in or register at www.packt.com.
  2. Select the Support tab.
  3. Click on Code Downloads.
  4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

  • WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
  • Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
  • 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-RxJava-Second-Edition. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Run code examples

If you open the downloaded code as an IntelliJ project, make sure to do the following on the Project Settings screen in a Modules section:

  • Remove the Android and Kotlin modules, if such are present.
  • Mark the Chapter01 through Chapter09 and Chapter12 folders as Source.
  • Mark the Chapter10/src/test/java folder as Tests.
  • Exclude the Chapter11 folder and gen (right-click and select Exclude).

All the examples are written for Java 1.8. However, some examples can be run only by JRE 9. In such cases, the comments in the examples advise on how to proceed.

Download the color images

Code in Action

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In our main() method, we have an Observable<String> that will push three string objects."

A block of code is set as follows:

repositories {
mavenCentral()
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

 public static void sleep(long millis) {
try {
Thread.sleep(millis);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ mkdir css
$ cd css

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Click on the Latest Version link and copy the dependency description provided."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.