Welcome

To develop web applications that have all the latest and greatest features and functionality, software engineers need to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. Of course, familiarity with the JavaScript syntax is a must. As Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, says, "Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript." Well, maybe not always in the pure JavaScript, but sometimes in its more productive superset, TypeScript. This sampler, containing relevant chapters from four Manning books, gives you a taste of the multiple facets of modern web and mobile applications.

There is a trend toward developing applications using principles of reactive programming. Under this model, the data consumer subscribes to the data stream that's pushed to the consumer only when the data is available. This is an alternative to the polling model that requires the client to make periodic requests for data which may or may not be available. The RxJS library implements the push model via observable streams of data. This library offers you a variety of chainable operators (functions) that handle and transform the data en route.