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)

Reading how an operator works


Throughout this book, you will see a lot of diagrams explaining how an operator works. These diagrams are a graphical representation of observables and operations in those observables. Usually, the diagrams consist of three parts. On the top they shows a line with balls representing the initial state of an observable. The line itself represents an observable. The circles are events that happened in this observable and they are pushed from left to right; therefore, the leftmost ball is the first event, the second one is the second, and so on. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

So, the preceding line represents an observable with three emitted events. The string at the center of each circle is the value emitted by that event. The short vertical line on the right-hand side of the diagram represents the end of this observable. This diagram is a graphical representation of the following observable:

Bacon 
   .fromArray([ 
         'First Event', 
      ...