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Build Reactive Websites with RxJS: Master Observables and Wrangle Events
Upgrade your skillset, succeed at work, and above all, avoid the many headaches that come with modern front-end development. Simplify your codebase with hands-on examples pulled from real-life applications. Master the mysteries of asynchronous state management, detangle puzzling race conditions, and send spaceships soaring through the cosmos. When you finish this book, you'll be able to tame the wild codebeasts before they ever get a chance to wreck your day. The front-end world can be fraught with complexity. The RxJS library offers a Observables. Observables merge other JavaScript asynch mechanisms such as callbacks and promises into a new way of looking at data. Instead of dealing with objects and keeping track of their state, Observables view asynchronous events as a stream. RxJS provides you the tools to manage, manipulate, and process Observables to simplify and speed up your front-end applications. Never fear, you're in exactly the right place. Don't worry about getting stuck in a mire of theory. Start off with the basics, building small applications that illustrate deeper points. Take those building blocks and apply them to much more complex problems like handling asynchronous state and dodging race conditions before they happen. Once you've got a handle on complex problems, take a leap into architecture, discovering how to structure an Observable-based application both without a framework and in the land of Angular 2. After mastering Observables, switch gears to building a canvas-based game, demonstrating your deep understanding of the flexibility of Observables. Master the Observable with RxJS, and make your asynchronous JavaScript code that much cleaner and simpler. What You Any major browser and text editor, as well as the current versions of git, NodeJS, and npm.
196 pages, Paperback
Published January 22, 2019
15 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 22, 2019
This book is a disappointment.
Learning Rx is a tricky beast. It looks shiny in the beginning. It takes a bit to figure out what observables, subjects and subscriptions are. Then it seems easy and understandable.
And then you start using them. Every day turns into an awkward fight we the library/editor/IDE/compiler. You’re struggling to figure out how to do something that should be trivial. Sure, it makes some things easier, but it makes some easy things awfully harder. You curse yourself about getting into it.
Until you use it for a while. Then it makes perfect sense and easy things are easy again. Your design becomes much better and some problems get greatly simplify it. You consider getting an “Rx” tattoo on a discrete place.
It can be a journey, and in order to teach it, you have to take a structured approach – gradually introduce the concepts, backing them with examples of increasing complexity and real-world-ness. Common pitfalls should be explained and Rx code should be constantly compared with the non-Rx alternatives. The struggles of the reader should be anticipated and addressed. Good narrative takes care of that.
This book doesn’t care about good narrative. Instead, it picks a few tired examples and explodes them in too many pages, struggling to actually explain anything in the meantime. It barely shows a few operators. It barely shows just the most obvious ways to combine them. It barely shows you anything about RxJS. In a few short chapters it’s done with it.
What does it do with all the extra space you ask? Well, talk about Angular of course. Half of the book is basically Angular stuff that you didn’t ask for. It shows a couple of interesting things, but you either need to know Angular to get them or be able to infer it quickly. If you’re already experienced with it, you’ll barely learn anything new. If you don’t know and don’t care... well, neither does this book.
And to cap it off, the final chapter is “reactive game development”, which barely builds a game in a way that one probably shouldn’t emulate when building games. It has a couple of meaningful moments, but they are not enough to remove the bitter taste of having chosen to read all the way through.
You’re better off reading a tutorial about RxJS.
P.S.: Rx is pretty amazing. Depending on what you do, it can be quite useful. I’ve found it irreplaceable in iOS. In React it may be a bit more limited, but it can still find its uses. It’s an approach definitely worth learning. Just not from this book.
Learning Rx is a tricky beast. It looks shiny in the beginning. It takes a bit to figure out what observables, subjects and subscriptions are. Then it seems easy and understandable.
And then you start using them. Every day turns into an awkward fight we the library/editor/IDE/compiler. You’re struggling to figure out how to do something that should be trivial. Sure, it makes some things easier, but it makes some easy things awfully harder. You curse yourself about getting into it.
Until you use it for a while. Then it makes perfect sense and easy things are easy again. Your design becomes much better and some problems get greatly simplify it. You consider getting an “Rx” tattoo on a discrete place.
It can be a journey, and in order to teach it, you have to take a structured approach – gradually introduce the concepts, backing them with examples of increasing complexity and real-world-ness. Common pitfalls should be explained and Rx code should be constantly compared with the non-Rx alternatives. The struggles of the reader should be anticipated and addressed. Good narrative takes care of that.
This book doesn’t care about good narrative. Instead, it picks a few tired examples and explodes them in too many pages, struggling to actually explain anything in the meantime. It barely shows a few operators. It barely shows just the most obvious ways to combine them. It barely shows you anything about RxJS. In a few short chapters it’s done with it.
What does it do with all the extra space you ask? Well, talk about Angular of course. Half of the book is basically Angular stuff that you didn’t ask for. It shows a couple of interesting things, but you either need to know Angular to get them or be able to infer it quickly. If you’re already experienced with it, you’ll barely learn anything new. If you don’t know and don’t care... well, neither does this book.
And to cap it off, the final chapter is “reactive game development”, which barely builds a game in a way that one probably shouldn’t emulate when building games. It has a couple of meaningful moments, but they are not enough to remove the bitter taste of having chosen to read all the way through.
You’re better off reading a tutorial about RxJS.
P.S.: Rx is pretty amazing. Depending on what you do, it can be quite useful. I’ve found it irreplaceable in iOS. In React it may be a bit more limited, but it can still find its uses. It’s an approach definitely worth learning. Just not from this book.
May 5, 2021
Back in the days where I was coding angular, I had to use RxJS since it was angular way of handling data streams. I like it since those days. The core concept of RxJS in my opinion is that instead of asking for new steams of data, you just wait until it is present. Then you are free to adjust it with your requirements. In fact you react to your data stream.
This book is a fair enough introduction regarding what RxJS is and how it works. It actually tries to build a mental model around RxJS. It provides sample applications and easy to reproduce examples which I believe is necessary for learning such a hard to learn topic. The book did its job good enough. I recommend it to refresh your understanding of the topic.
This book is a fair enough introduction regarding what RxJS is and how it works. It actually tries to build a mental model around RxJS. It provides sample applications and easy to reproduce examples which I believe is necessary for learning such a hard to learn topic. The book did its job good enough. I recommend it to refresh your understanding of the topic.
February 24, 2019
I'm an Angular developer, and I use RxJS a lot in my development. I picked up this book after having seen Randall at a couple conferences, and I wanted to see his take on things.
This isn't a thick book, but it gives really good information on Reactive programming, RxJS, Angular, and Angular's Reactive Forms. It doesn't go into ngrx and Angular performance much, but the introduction it gives for both is solid.
In my development, I really appreciate the power of reactive development and Reactive Forms, and it was good to see them taken seriously here (I think Reactive Forms in particular are underappreciated).
The only part of the book (besides a line and hint here and there) that was new for me was the last chapter on writing a game in canvas. Pretty cool stuff.
I teach classes on Angular through my company's Angular Boot Camp, and I'm going to suggest this book to future students as a resource for good Angular and web development.
This isn't a thick book, but it gives really good information on Reactive programming, RxJS, Angular, and Angular's Reactive Forms. It doesn't go into ngrx and Angular performance much, but the introduction it gives for both is solid.
In my development, I really appreciate the power of reactive development and Reactive Forms, and it was good to see them taken seriously here (I think Reactive Forms in particular are underappreciated).
The only part of the book (besides a line and hint here and there) that was new for me was the last chapter on writing a game in canvas. Pretty cool stuff.
I teach classes on Angular through my company's Angular Boot Camp, and I'm going to suggest this book to future students as a resource for good Angular and web development.
August 28, 2021
This book jumps from one topic to another without any clear structure. If you're planning to explore what RxJS has to offer, you'd be better off buying RxJS in Action which covers the topic more in depth.
August 18, 2023
Great book on RxJs and the state development of angular applications via ngRx. It has everything you need, so don't let the old date tricks you. Very useful and comprehensive. I finished it in two weeks but felt like I had a jump of knowledge that was worth long months or years.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews