The JS world
It is important to recap one's understanding of some of the JavaScript world's state of affairs. The most important aspect is that the language is single-threaded and, given this, the only option left for developers to write asynchronous code is by using callbacks, promises, and events. As a developer, you should be comfortable with the functional programming aspects of JS (in addition to its innate dynamic nature), including closures, higher-order functions, anonymous functions, and extension methods (augmenting types). We also cannot discount the advancements that have been made in the language core itself, with Node.js now becoming a preferred backend for serious scalability involving async I/O. Let's have a quick peek into these core concepts before we dive into RxJS.
As we all know (we presume you do), functions are objects in JavaScript, and they are first-class citizens, which makes JS a functional programming language as well (although it is formally...