Book Image

Mastering Reactive JavaScript

By : Erich de Souza Oliveira
Book Image

Mastering Reactive JavaScript

By: Erich de Souza Oliveira

Overview of this book

If you’re struggling to handle a large amount of data and don’t know how to improve your code readability, then reactive programming is the right solution for you. It lets you describe how your code behaves when changes happen and makes it easier to deal with real-time data. This book will teach you what reactive programming is, and how you can use it to write better applications. The book starts with the basics of reactive programming, what Reactive Extensions is, and how can you use it in JavaScript along with some reactive code using Bacon. Next, you’ll discover what an Observable and an Observer are and when to use them.You'll also find out how you can query data through operators, and how to use schedulers to react to changes. Moving on, you’ll explore the RxJs API, be introduced to the problem of data traffic (backpressure), and see how you can mitigate it. You’ll also learn about other important operators that can help improve your code readability, and you’ll see how to use transducers to compose operators. At the end of the book, you’ll get hands-on experience of using RxJs, and will create a real-time web chat using RxJs on the client and server, providing you with the complete package to master RxJs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

The road so far


In previous chapters we learned a lot about functional reactive programming and how we can use it to improve the readability and maintainability of our code; we used two different libraries so:

  • bacon.js
  • RxJS

We started with bacon.js because it is simpler to learn and to start creating reactive codes, but after this introduction we explored RxJS as it implements other concepts that we can use to improve our applications.

These two libraries are not the only available libraries for functional reactive programming in JavaScript, but by understanding them, you can probably learn some of the others libraries available with ease.

Another advantage of RxJS over the other libraries for functional reactive programming in JavaScript is its being an implementation of the Rx specification. You can find this implementation for several other languages and platforms such as RxJava and RxSwift for instance, so a good understanding of functional reactive programming and RxJS can improve your code...