Introducing the RxSwift book

It was June 15th of last year. I had just finished giving my AltConf presentation, Reactive Programming with RxSwift.

Ray Wenderlich (@rwenderlich) approached me, and asked if I’d be interested in authoring a book on RxSwift for the RW library. I’d written a couple tutorials in the past for him and also gave a tech talk once. These were great experiences, and as much as I love talking, writing, and recording video courses about RxSwift, I didn't hesitate to say, "Sure, let’s do it!"

With the goal of completing this book in time to promote it at RwDevCon (which happened this past weekend), we realized the need early on for multiple authors, and the first names that came to mind were Marin Todorov (@icanzilb), Florent Pillet (@fpillet), and Junior Bontognali (@bontoJR). These guys are not only key contributors to RxSwift and related community libraries, but they are also active on the RxSwift Slack channel, always willing to help newcomers and generally being outstanding ambassadors in the community. Ray asked me to also be the final pass editor (FPE), and he later approached Ash Furrow (@ashfurrow) to be the tech editor. We had a crack team and I was excited to get started!

Not so fast, though! At the time I accepted Ray’s offer to write and FPE this book, I was also about to start a new job as the manager of the iOS team at The Weather Channel and record two more courses for LinkedIn Learning (fka lynda.com), both of these later that same month! I also needed to rewrite my app LOC, in large part because it was using Parse, which was going to be shut down soon. I had a lot on my plate! And this caused me to delay us getting started, unintentionally also jeopardizing the goal we'd set of completing it in time to announce it at RwDevCon. It was at that point that Ray approached me about Marin taking over as FPE. With Marin having already authored numerous tutorials, books, and video courses for the RW library, he knew the ropes and it made perfect sense.

The overall process went smoothly, thanks in large part to the editorial team including Ash, Marin, and Chris Belanger (@crispytwit). Add to the mix some awesome artwork by Vicki Wenderlich (@gameartguppy), and we had a book ready to go to press, in time for RwDevCon to boot!

We set out to write a book that would become a goto resource for not just dabbling in RxSwift but becoming proficient with the fundamentals, patterns, and best practices for developing enterprise-quality RxSwift-driven apps. We hope we’ve succeeded in that endeavor and are ever so thankful for you to check it out.