Preface

We wrote this book to help you understand the power and significance of reactive programming in JavaScript and develop the skills to put RxJS to work.

FROM PAUL: Like many skills, RxJS was not something I had originally set out to learn but instead something I stumbled on and continued in, only because of a confluence of events. Earlier in my programming career, I had been working on a new UI system for an internal tool in which the project owner had given me a large degree of latitude regarding what technologies I employed. Because the only constraint was that it be written in .NET, I was introduced to Rx.NET first while trying to build out various UI interactions. During and after my college years, my experience had been primarily of an object-oriented nature. I understood the singleton pattern, the decorator, the adapter, and others, and I had heard of a fabled programming paradigm that focused—seemingly counterintuitively—on functions. But to me, that seemed entirely backward. Ignoring the larger context involved, I happily plugged the new library into my application, thinking it a simple substitute for the existing .NET event system.