Mastering Reactive JavaScript

Book excerpt: Expand your boundaries by creating applications empowered with real-time data using RxJs without compromising performance About This Book Handle an infinite stream of incoming data using RxJs without going crazy Explore important RxJs operators that can help you improve your code readability Get acquainted with the different techniques and operators used to handle data traffic, which occurs when you receive data faster than you can process Who This Book Is For If you're a web developer with some basic JavaScript programming knowledge who wants to implement the reactive programming paradigm with JavaScript, then this book is for you. What You Will Learn Get to know the basics of functional reactive programming using RxJs Process a continuous flow of data with linear memory consumption Filter, group, and react to changes in your system Discover how to deal with data traffic Compose operators to create new operators and use them in multiple observables to avoid code repetition Explore transducers and see how they can improve your code readability Detect and recover from errors in observables using Retry and Catch operators Create your own reactive application: a real-time webchat In Detail 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. Style and approach This easy-to-follow guide is full of hands-on examples of reactive programming. Each topic is explained and placed in context, and for the more inquisitive there are more details of the concepts used, ending with an application using the concepts learned through the book.