Practical Combine: An introduction to Combine with real examples

by Donny Wals

Learn Combine from the ground up with a solid theoretical foundation and real-world examples of where and how Combine can help you move from writing imperative code to writing reactive code that is flexible, clean and modern.

The book has a total of 13 chapters and comes with a Playground and sample projects that show the code from the chapters in a way that allows you to experiment with the code directly, and expand your knowledge about Combine even quicker.

Genres: Programming, Software

Unknown Binding

Reviews

[Fernando Fernandes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. The writing flows during the first chapters, easy reading. It's overall well written and straight to the point. The last chapters are OK, but superficial to my taste. "Building your own Publishers..." is all over the place. "Debugging your Combine code" talks basically (and briefly) about "print()" -- and the rest of the chapter focus on a third-party library called Timelane. It could explore breakpoints instead and just mention Timelane IMO. The chapter about testing is more like best practices on testing instead of testing Combine itself. And the final chapter is a collection of more advanced examples... Anyway, I would recommend this one. All the chapters before "Building your own Publishers..." taught me something new. A solid 3.5 out of 5. 👍🏻

[Dennis Nehrenheim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Context & Why I read this book
This is the fourth book I finished in 2021. My motivation was to get my hands dirty with Combine, Apple's new Functional Reactive Programming framework.

What the book is about
The book is about getting to know Combine and is comprised of 13 chapters:
Chapter 1 - Introducing Functional Reactive Programming
Chapter 2 - Exploring publishers and subscribers
Chapter 3 - Transforming publishers
Chapter 4 - Updating the User Interface
Chapter 5 - Using Combine to respond to user input
Chapter 6 - Using Combine for networking
Chapter 7 - Wrapping existing asynchronous processes with Futures in Combine
Chapter 8 - Understanding Combine’s Schedulers
Chapter 9 - Building your own Publishers, Subscribers, and Subscriptions
Chapter 10 - Debugging your Combine code
Chapter 11 - Testing code that uses Combine
Chapter 12 - Driving publishers and flows with subjects
Chapter 13 - Where to go from here

Additionally, some source code and example projects are provided.

One lesson I am taking from it
I especially liked the sections on backpressure management (controlling flow by signaling a subscriber’s readiness to receive elements) which, in my opinion, was explained better than in other resources on the topic I know of. After this book, I am confident that I understood this concept better.

Reading Recommendation / Who should read this?
I recommend this as a cheap, quick & dirty introduction to the subject. It is no theoretical deep dive but supposed to be a hands-on practical book. Still, in my opinion, it did not live up to its name. It was actually more theoretical than I had hoped for.

1 ⭑ — Abysmal; extremely bad. Couldn't / wouldn't finish. No one should waste his time on this!
2 ⭑— Very bad; skipped part of it; skimmed most of it.
3 ⭑⭑ — Bad, but forced me to finish; close to no nuggets to be found.
4 ⭑⭑ — Rather bad; finished but definitely would not give it a re-read.
5 ⭑⭑⭑ — Modest; a few nuggets; reading recommended in certain circumstances
6 ⭑⭑⭑ — OK; the average read. Tangible weaknesses, but recommended with some reservations
7 ⭑⭑⭑⭑ — Good read, despite minor weaknesses; generally recommended
8 ⭑⭑⭑⭑ — Very good; would recommend nearly without restriction
9 ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑ — An outstanding work; worthwhile to be read twice or more often; a definitive recommendation
10 ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑ — A work of genius; should be required for everyone

[Igor Malyarov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor blogging wrapped in a book

This book would benefit tremendously from dropping unfulfilled promises and endless self references. About 20% is a real meat (so, should it be a one ★?), everything else is annoying noise.
The language is just plain bad, so do not forget to take a good care of your eyes and brain.

[Tarek Bussiness · Rating 2 out of 5]

i feel like that this book drift away from the content , it like diving deep into examples (not very good ones) , and not focusing on the real deal , iam sorry but it not like any other books like kodeco or big mountain studio , please man look for someone who can help you with writing a programming book

[Aivars Meijers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the best book on this topic that I found in the market right now. There are not many of them, so 5 stars all well desired.
I would like to see more SwiftUI examples in the "Practical" book, but few youtube tutorials can fill that gap, the combine is very well covered.