Suggestions for future releases and book feedback

📚 Official Books RxSwift
1

Hi,

I’ve finished my first read of the book (yes, I plan to read it again :grinning: ) and I would like to leave some suggestions and feedback about the book.

First impression, the book is heavy! The first chapters (well, more or less the first half of the book), which covered operators, are hard to digest since there are a lot of things to cover and learn, but I understand it’s difficult to create more excitement while explaining this, at least for me since I’m more a ‘practical’ kind of guy. I see this part of the book as a tool to revise as needed.
The other half (community, architecture and demos) are “easy” to go through, because there are a lot of practise and for me it’s easier to feel engaged doing “real apps” instead of minor examples.

Now the suggestions:

  1. Expand MVVM chapters.
    I think architecture is very important and an interesting subject and I feel the book only covers the basics of MVVM.

  2. The last chapter could be bigger.
    My opinion on this is almost the same as the one of a book review I’ve read. Since we are building a “Complete RxSwift App”, I think it should contain topics such as error handling, retries, pagination (I think I’ve never saw this done in RxSwift), etc; and unit tests for example.

  3. Actions could be extended too.
    The chapter about Actions is a short one and I think the concept and the cases

  4. Add a chapter about state managing.
    In my opinion, this is a crucial topic on FRP and maybe the authors could make a chapter talking about it (e.g. how to use scan to manage/remove state, how to manage the pagination “problem” when dealing with network requests without storing the current page on a variable, etc) and use these things on the apps build in the last chapters.

  5. I see a lot of people asking for an example of the last chapter with a tab bar controller instead of a navigation controller. I think it will be a good addition too.

I think this is all for now (maybe when revising the book again I’ll add or update this :smile: ).

Lastly, I want to praise and give a big thanks to the authors for the awesome job they’ve done by creating this book!

Best regards,
Amadeu Andrade

[Edit] Added 5) on the suggestions.

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2

Thanks for taking the time to leave this wonderful feedback! It really, really helps us when people share their thoughts so we know what worked well and what can be improved. thank you, Marin

3

Very relevant feedback !!

4

Hi,

Interesting topic. I have read the book several times. And I am agree that MVVM and Actions could be extended, especially when you are a beginner.

I am developing an application using Realm, RxSwift, CloudKit, Coordinators, Actions, UITabBarController, UICollectionViews and my major concern is that an important group of professional developers are working without storyboards, doing all programmatically. I also revamped some applications and I found that they were developed programmatically, I know this is an advanced topic, but this is also an advanced book.

In my opinion the chapter 24 could be developed using a better architecture (programmatically :grinning:), with more options, where the returned values go beyond the easy String type. Using UITabBarController, Coordinators, Clean Architecture, UICollectionViews.

OK, in my opinion this is the only book that deserves to be read in RxSwift community, as I told to Marin on Twitter: “This book helps me to become a better developer”. This book taught me about coordinators, with coordinators I learn about better architectures, then to work programmatically, to work programmatically taught me to understand the iOS fundamentals, and RxSwift book in general taught me to think different. To think about the things I haven’t developed yet.

My best regards,

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