Learning RxJava: Reactive, Concurrent, and responsive applications

by Thomas Nield

Reactive Programming with Java and ReactiveX

About This Book Explore the essential tools and operators RxJava provides, and know which situations to use them in Delve into Observables and Subscribers, the core components of RxJava used for building scalable and performant reactive applications Delve into the practical implementation of tools to effectively take on complex tasks such as concurrency and backpressure Who This Book Is For

The primary audience for this book is developers with at least a fundamental mastery of Java.

Some readers will likely be interested in RxJava to make programs more resilient, concurrent, and scalable. Others may be checking out reactive programming just to see what it is all about, and to judge whether it can solve any problems they may have.

What You Will Learn Learn the features of RxJava 2 that bring about many significant changes, including new reactive types such as Flowable, Single, Maybe, and Completable Understand how reactive programming works and the mindset to "think reactively" Demystify the Observable and how it quickly expresses data and events as sequences Learn the various Rx operators that transform, filter, and combine data and event sequences Leverage multicasting to push data to multiple destinations, and cache and replay them Discover how concurrency and parallelization work in RxJava, and how it makes these traditionally complex tasks trivial to implement Apply RxJava and Retrolambda to the Android domain to create responsive Android apps with better user experiences Use RxJava with the Kotlin language to express RxJava more idiomatically with extension functions, data classes, and other Kotlin features In Detail

RxJava is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using Observable sequences for the JVM, allowing developers to build robust applications in less time.

Learning RxJava addresses all the fundamentals of reactive programming to help readers write reactive code, as well as teach them an effective approach to designing and implementing reactive libraries and applications.

Starting with a brief introduction to reactive programming concepts, there is an overview of Observables and Observers, the core components of RxJava, and how to combine different streams of data and events together. You will also learn simpler ways to achieve concurrency and remain highly performant, with no need for synchronization. Later on, we will leverage backpressure and other strategies to cope with rapidly-producing sources to prevent bottlenecks in your application. After covering custom operators, testing, and debugging, the book dives into hands-on examples using RxJava on Android as well as Kotlin.

Style and approach

This book will be different from other Rx books, taking an approach that comprehensively covers Rx concepts and practical applications.

Genres: Programming, Technology

380 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2017

Reviews

[Ľuboš Barskto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solidna a kompaktna ucebnica reaktivneho programovania v Jave (a Kotline). Napriek zopar vyhradam davam 5/5.

Obcas mi kniha pripominala skor API dokumentaciu a chybali mi trochu specifickejsie nazorne ukazky, vsetko to bolo na mna trochu prilis teoreticke. Ale autor to trochu vynahradza v prilohe.

Text bol trochu zbytocne roztahany. V kazdej kapitole je najskor napisane co sa ide preberat, potom je samotne "ucivo" a na konci v summary to vsetko znova zopakuje. Naco? Uplne zbytocny text.

Najviac som sa tesil na kapitolu o Androide. O to vacsie bolo sklamanie, ked okrem zopar ukazok na urovni Hello World tam nebolo nic a kapitola sama bola obsahovo najmensia zo vsetkych. Autorova poznamka na zaciatku kapitoly o tom, ze od citatela sa ocakava aspon zakladne vzdelanie z Androidu este aj s odkazom na odporucanu literaturu je imho zbytocna, pretoze kazdy priemerny Java programator tu kapitolu pochopi aj keby ani netusil co to je Android. Kapitola Using RxJava for Kotlin bola nastastie ovela lepsia a zachranila moj dojem z knihy.

Autor deklaruje, ze sa pri pisani inspiroval knihou Java Effective od Joshua Bloch. To je citit podla formy textu, ale nedosahuje az taku vysoku kvalitu ako tento uz spomenuty svaty gral Java programatorov. K tomu mi tam chyba trochu viac "deep under the hood insight"-ov a trochu strucnejsi, ale zato udernejsi text. Napriek tomu to je velmi poucne citanie a zmenilo to moj programatorsky pohlad na svet. Na ziadne data sa uz nebudem pozerat tak ako predtym.

[Antonel Pazargic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book about reactive programming in java.
The book was scattered with a lot of simple to grasp examples to cement the reactive principles foundation. I found it covers approaches for a lot of real-world cases, such as backpressure, combining observable, concurrency and parallelization and even how to debug a reactive based application with rx-java.
I also enjoyed the fact the kotlin made its entrance in this book as a companion for further simplification.
For me it is the best way to start this interesting journey of reactive programming.

[Bartosz Bilicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading it after finishing 'Reactive Programming with RxJava: Creating Asynchronous, Event-Based Applications by Tomasz Nurkiewicz, Ben Christensen'.

Very similar to before-mentioned title. Not really worth reading both, choose one.
This book seems to be targeted to more beginner developer (more simple examples). Also it has more about Kotlin and Android. Finally it targets RxJava2, where ''Reactive Programming.. ' is about rxJava1, with short chapter with differences (differences are actually very little).

[Alex Serna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. It is well written and easy to read. The examples are easy to follow.

[Luiz Gustavo Pozzo · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a positive side I would say the chapters are short and well grouped and it is reasonably easy to read.
But the author seems to lack knowledge on OO approach and keeps attacking it with poor comparisons to pend to his beloved reactive approach.
Examples are very verbose and hard to read, especially if you have a narrow screen (like I do), some of the examples you might need to just skip altogether.
I would not recommend this book if you are looking to find the real values to use reactive programming. But it can be useful to have some introduction to RxJava if you ignore the details.

[Kotchaphan Muangsan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly and useful. If you want to understand the foundation of RxJava this book is good choice for you

[Lizardo Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enseña desde lo más básico hasta lo más difícil de entender como el paralelismo y la concurrencia, el manejo de hilos con RxJava.