Chapter 1, Thinking Reactively, introduces you to RxJava.

Chapter 2, Observables and Subscribers, talks about the core types in RxJava, including the Observable and Observer.

Chapter 3, Basic Operators, gives you a thorough introduction to the core operators that allow you to express logic quickly and make RxJava productive.

Chapter 4, Combining Observables, teaches you how to usefully combine multiple Observable sources together in a variety of ways.

Chapter 5, Multicasting, Replaying, and Caching, consolidates streams to prevent redundant work with multiple Observers, as well as replay and cache emissions.

Chapter 6, Concurrency and Parallelization, helps you discover how RxJava flexibly and powerfully enables concurrency in your application.

Chapter 7, Switching, Throttling, Windowing, and Buffering, develops strategies to cope with rapidly-producing Observables without backpressure.

Chapter 8, Flowables and Backpressure, utilizes the Flowable to leverage backpressure and keep producers from out-pacing consumers.

Chapter 9, Transformers and Custom Operators, teaches you how to reuse reactive logic and create your own RxJava operators.

Chapter 10, Testing and Debugging, leverages effective tools to test and debug your RxJava code bases.

Chapter 11, RxJava on Android, teaches you how to apply your RxJava knowledge and RxAndroid extensions to streamline your Android apps.

Chapter 12, Using RxJava for Kotlin New, takes advantage of Kotlin’s language features to enable expressive patterns with RxJava.

We will be using Java 8, so Oracle’s JDK 1.8 will be required. You will need an environment to write and compile your Java code (I recommend Intellij IDEA), and preferably a build automation system such as Gradle or Maven. Later in this book, we will use Android Studio.

Everything you need in this book should be free to use and not require commercial or personal licensing.

This book is for Java programmers who have a fundamental grasp of object-oriented programing and core Java features. You should be familiar with variables, types, classes, properties, methods, generics, inheritance, interfaces, and static classes/properties/methods. In the Java standard library, you should at least be familiar with collections (including Lists, Sets, and Maps) as well as object equality (hashcode()/equals()). If any of these topics sound unfamiliar, you may want to read Java: A Beginner’s Guide by Herbert Schildt to learn the fundamentals of Java. Also, Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch is a classic book that should be on every Java developer’s shelf. This book strives to use the best practices cited by Bloch.

You do not need to be familiar with concurrency as a prerequisite. This topic will be covered from an RxJava perspective.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can also use several operators between Observable and Observer to transform each pushed item or manipulate them in some way".

A block of code is set as follows:

import io.reactivex.Observable;
public class Launcher {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
        Observable<String> myStrings =
          Observable.just("Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma", "Delta", 
"Epsilon");
      }
}

Any output is written as follows:

    Alpha 
    Beta 
    Gamma 
    Delta 
    Epsilon

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You also have the option to use Maven, and you can view the appropriate configuration in The Central Repository by selecting the Apache Maven configuration information."

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