Most modern mobile applications require that the user interface be responsive despite simultaneous operations occurring—downloading data over the network, displaying animations, writing files to disk, etc. As a consequence, concurrency and asynchronicity are inherent in mobile programming. Orchestrating concurrent code written in an imperative way, however, is known to be difficult and error-prone. Using the reactive programming paradigm, we are able to simplify much of these needs.
In the Android-world, the leading library for enabling reactive programming is RxJava. RxJava is the backbone of many large-scale applications such as Netflix, Soundcloud, and Trello. This book seeks to explain all there is to know about this topic and its applications in Android development using the latest version of RxJava, RxJava 2.x, by using examples that are familiar to Android developers.
At a high level, you will learn the following concepts:
- The 3 O's—Observable, Operator, Observer
- Alternative base reactive types—Completable, Maybe, Flowable
- Multithreading
- Hot vs. Cold Observables
- Subjects
- Error Handling
- Backpressure
- ...and many more!
If you are using Kotlin to develop Android apps, check out our other book "Reactive Programming on Android with RxKotlin."
