To help you get started with RxJS, we recommend you to read this post.
RxJS is a library that allows us to easily create and manipulate streams of events and data. This makes complex asynchronous development much easier to handle and understand. Angular 2 adopted RxJS as a dependency, and uses it to manage its stream of data and flow of actions.
In this tutorial, we will be using fundamental RxJS operators, as listed below:
map - Transform values of the observable (into another observable). Common use cases are converting, parsing, adding new fields etc.
filter - Filters values emitted by the observable, and continue the flow only with the values which passed the filter handler.
startWith - Sets the initial value for the previous operation before proceeding.
flatMap - Useful when we want to resolve a set of observables.
RxJS offers plenty of operators, which can ease the development process. A more detailed explanation can be found in the RxJS manual.
Angular 2 uses ngrx package, and supports Observable data sources (For example, using ngFor directive).
meteor-rxjs wraps Meteor's basic functionality and exposes RxJS interfaces which can be used to manipulate reactive data sources; The meteor-rxjs package will be used vastly further in this tutorial, so as we go further, you'll probably get a better perception for it.