RxJS tutorial that doesn't assume familiarity with reactive programming concepts or Rx .NET?

Question

I'm trying to wrap my head around how RxJS works and if it suits my needs, but every article I come across assumes that the reader is already familiar with reactive programming concepts or has knowledge of the .NET version.

Is there any material out there that focuses on the average JavaScript developer?

Answer 1

I found former Microsoft employee now Netflix employee Jafar Husain's interactive tutorials they use at Netflix to teach RxJS to their new employees to be very helpful.

The nice thing about it assumes no familiarity with either functional or reactive programming concepts. The tutorials can easily lead to improvement in those concepts as well if you know neither or already know one, the other, or both. This makes it a great place to start as both concepts are used in RxJS.

http://jhusain.github.io/learnrx/

source: https://youtu.be/gawmdhCNy-A?t=38m6s

There is also a website called RxMarbles which has interactive diagrams of how all RxJS' methods for observables work. It shows how they work through illustration of events on an input and output timeline of any given RxJS method. You can drag the events from left to right on the input timeline to get a feel for how each method outputs and works.

Here is a great read titled the "General Theory of Reactivity" by Kris Kowal (he's the author of the Promise library Q) It has been reviewed by three of his peers Domenic Denicola, Ryan Paul, and Kevin Smith. You may just want to read the section on Observables, but overall it's a great read, but a bit esoteric.

Also there is this piece on WHATWG's streams specification FAQ about what the difference is between readable streams and observables.

Then there is the official documentation.

Another great resource is egghead.io which has 100 videos on RxJS (at the time of writing this) and most are presented in courses. They are very good, (short and to the point) but you have to pay a monthly fee to access some of them. You could definitley watch them all in one month without paying for any extra.

Answer 2

I personally found this wonderful tutorial https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754 very helpful.