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)

Chapter 3. A World Full of Changes - Reactive Extensions to the Rescue

In the previous chapter, you learned the very basics of functional reactive programming, using the bacon.js library. We discussed what is an observable and saw two different flavors of it in the bacon.js library (EventStream and Property). We also looked at how to create observables from common event sources (interval, array, or user input) and even from any other possible source ( using the fromBinder() method).

After an introduction to observables, we looked at how to subscribe to it. You can react to events, errors, or even detect the end of an observable when you subscribe to it. So, you learned how to create an observer for your observables.

One of the really important lessons from the previous chapter was the usage of diagrams to explain how observables and operators occur, along with text explanations and example code. Understanding diagrams is the key to understanding the behavior of operators and observables; you...