What Does Being Reactive Mean?

If you have bought this book, you have probably already heard about reactive programming (or even functional reactive programming). Nowadays, a lot of developers claim to use it in their own project; it is also easy to find posts on the Internet saying how amazing it is when compared with older paradigms. But, know you are doing a great job with the tools you have in your hands.

Learning a new programming paradigm is really hard. Most of the time you don't even know you needed it before you already mastered it, and you always have to ask yourself if this is really something that is worth the hours of studying or if it is just a new buzzword that all the cool kids are talking about, without adding real value to your programming skills.

Maybe you have tried reactive programming before, even used it in a small project or, like me, you just thought it wasn't worth a try, but for some reason you decided to give the paradigm an opportunity, (you are always thirsty for knowledge, I know, I was in your shoes a couple of years ago). It took me a lot of time to understand why I needed reactive programming and how to master it. I want to make sure that you have an easier path than I had.

This book will guide you through the reactive programming principles, and using a lot of examples, I will show you how to process and combine different sources of data or events to create astonishing live applications. In this first chapter, we are going to use the bacon.js library just to understand the basics and then we will go deeper with Reactive Extensions (RxJS).

Before we dive into programming, you need to understand what reactive programming is and the problems it is designed to solve.

This chapter will cover the following points:

• Understanding what reactive programming is
• Comparison between reactive programming and imperative programming
• Knowing what problems reactive programming solves
• Installation of the tools needed throughout this book
• The first example of functional reactive programming will use a JavaScript library