Learning RxJava – Second Edition by Nick Samoylov, Thomas Nield

RxJava is not just a popular library for building asynchronous and event-based applications; it also enables you to create a cleaner and more readable code base. In this book, you’ll cover the core fundamentals of reactive programming and learn how to design and implement reactive libraries and applications.

Learning RxJava will help you understand how reactive programming works and guide you in writing your first example in reactive code. You’ll get to grips with the workings of Observable and Subscriber, and see how they are used in different contexts using real-world use cases. The book will also take you through multicasting and caching to help prevent redundant work with multiple Observers. You’ll then learn how to create your own RxJava operators by reusing reactive logic. As you advance, you’ll explore effective tools and libraries to test and debug RxJava code. Finally, you’ll delve into RxAndroid extensions and use Kotlin features to streamline your Android apps.

By the end of this book, you’ll become proficient in writing reactive code in Java and Kotlin to build concurrent applications, including Android applications.

What you will learn
Discover different ways to create Observables, Observers, and Subscribers
Multicast in order to push data to multiple destinations and cache and replay them
Express RxJava idiomatically with the help of Kotlin features such as extension functions and data classes
Become familiar with various operators available in RxJava to perform common transformations and tasks
Explore RxJava’s reactive types, including Flowable, Single, Maybe, and Completable
Demystify Observables and how they express data and events as sequences
Who this book is for
This book is for Java developers who want to leverage reactive programming to develop more resilient and concurrent applications. If you’re an RxJava user looking to get to grips with the latest features and updates in RxJava 3, this book is for you. Fundamental knowledge of core Java features and object-oriented programming will assist you in understanding the key concepts covered in this book.

Table of Contents
Thinking Reactively
Observable and Observer
Basic Operators
Combining Observables
Multicasting, Replaying, and Caching
Concurrency and Parallelization
Switching, Throttling, Windowing, and Buffering
Flowables and Backpressure
Transformers and Custom Operators
Testing and Debugging
RxJava on Android
Using RxJava for Kotlin
Appendix A: Introducing Lambda Expressions
Appendix B: Functional Types
Appendix C: Mixing Object-Oriented and Reactive Programming
Appendix D: Materializing and Dematerializing
Appendix E: Understanding Schedulers