Reactive Programming for Android - Udemy

Writing code on Android is hard. Writing high-quality code that involves concurrent and parallel tasks is even harder. Ensuring that this code will run without unforeseen race conditions is an order-of-magnitude harder. RxJava can help write code for such tasks.

In this course the novice developer will be introduced to a wide variety of tools that RxJava provides to enable them to produce robust and high-quality code for their asynchronous tasks by building a relatively simple application using advanced RxJava techniques to produce a high-quality product.

The starting sections will lead the developer through RxJava's initial setup in the Android environment. Later you will learn about RxJava 2.0 step-by-step by starting off with stock data processing and display. The developer will learn to choose appropriate Schedulers and to use the Retrofit library for remote requests. In the final sections, the viewer will also learn advanced topics such as adding integration to Twitter to process its streaming data by combining it with stock data.

About The Author

Tadas Subonis started coding when he was about thirteen. Since then, he has programmed with PHP, JavaScript, Python, C++, and Java (the language in which he has probably written the most code). He took up Android relatively recently, around 2014 (after a few false starts in 2012).

However, he soon learned that Android lacks decent support for asynchronous programming (Async Task was/is a joke) while more reckless languages, such as JavaScript, had had promises for a long time. Furthermore, Java's standard library lacked decent support for functional programming primitives (map, filter), but that was easily fixable with libraries such as Guava.

This led Tadas to a search for a library that would help him achieve a Promise-like functionality and interface. It didn't take him long to find ReactiveX and its family of implementations (including RxJava), which handles streams in a Reactive fashion. It didn't exactly offer the flow that Promise-like systems provide but, soon enough, he realized that it was even more powerful.

Since then, he has been using RxJava (and RxKotlin) for his daily Android programming. The quality of the code (the lack of bugs, readability, and maintainability) has improved ten-fold. Giving users of your application a fast, crash-free experience is a must these days when competition for user attention on app marketplaces is getting fiercer and fiercer.