I went on a reactive programming tangent thinking it would help me become an effective user of Angular web application framework. Because some very important parts of Angular made extensive use of a JavaScript reactive programming library called RxJS. I found a lot of general information about reactive programming out there, but I need to stay focused on Angular. Returning to Angular documentation, I picked another developer guide section to start reading: "HTTP client". This page has a "Prerequisites" section at the top which linked to an "Observables & RxJS Guide".

It was an introduction to reactive programming with the RxJS library, with examples that are relevant to Angular apps. I didn't know this guide existed. If I had, I would have started here first! If I had, I still wouldn't have understood RxJS immediately, but I would at least have a better focus as I ventured to other RxJS guides. Mostly thanks to Observables in Angular which showed the most common RxJS usage patterns.

I was mildly disappointed the Practical Usage page had only two examples, and one of them was the type-ahead autocomplete mechanism already covered in Tour of Heroes. At least that one had a breakdown of how the asynchronous processing pipeline worked to accomplish its goal. The other example "Exponential backoff" had no such explanation. Just an overly optimistic claim "With observables, it is very easy" before we were tossed a chunk of code with no comments nor a breakdown of what it did. Definitely room for improvement here.

RxJS Observables were compared & contrasted against JavaScript Promises in the "Observables compared to other techniques" section. I saw some unavoidable overlap with similar topics on other resources I recently read but still, it was a great way to help my brain think about how to make use of RxJS aligned with its strengths. But I know the best way to get comfortable with RxJS is to start working on code that use it.