with a new introduction by Lewis H. Lapham This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Pro Reactive Extensions and LINQ is a deep dive into the next important technology for .NET developers: Reactive Extensions. This in-depth tutorial goes beyond what is available anywhere else to teach how to write WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone applications using the Reactive Extensions (Rx) to handle events and asynchronousmethod calls.

Reactive programming allows you to turn those aspects of your code that are currently imperative into something much more event-driven and flexible. For this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as LINQ for Events.

Reactive programming hinges on the concept of the observable collection, as opposed to the simple enumerable collection with which we’re all familiar. For example, to extract data from a collection and add it to a list box, you would traditionally iterate through the list box, extracting each object in turn. This approach works fine, but it requires significant knowledge about the data you’re working with, which can be limiting. In Rx programming, you're instead informed about each object in turn and then free to react to each notification however you like, which affords much greater flexibility.

This book shows you how reactive programming can be applied to a range of situations—from WPF applications to Windows Phone apps—to improve coding efficiency and boost performance.

What you’ll learn

• How to create, debug and manage reactive extensions in many situations
• The observer pattern and how it can be applied to your projects
• How to avoid spaghetti code by using Rx to manage your asynchronous methods
• How to use SelectMany to explore the heart of the Reactive Extensions
• How to come to grips with the reactive user interface framework for building both small and large applications

Who this book is for

This book will be most beneficial to existing .NET developers with a grounding in WPF, Silverlight and C#, who want to take their skills further using the powerful reactive programming approach.

Table of Contents

1. Welcome to LINQ and RX
2. Core LINQ
3. Core Rx
4. Practical Rx
5. Inside Rx and LINQ
6. LINQ to SQL
7. Rx and Javascript
8. Reactive UI: Rx and MVVM
9. Testing Rx