i. What You Need

To follow along with the tutorials in this book, you’ll need the following:

• A PC running Windows 10 or a recent Linux such as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, or a Mac running the latest point release of macOS Catalina or later: You’ll need one of these to be able to install the latest versions of IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.
• IntelliJ IDEA Community 2020.1 or later: IntelliJ IDEA is the IDE upon which Android Studio is based, and it’s used in the book to look at pure Kotlin projects that demonstrate techniques in RxJava. You can download the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA Community for free here: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/
• JDK 8 or later: You’ll need a Java Development Kit installed for use with IntelliJ IDEA projects (Android Studio will use its own version of the JDK). You can download the Oracle JDK from here: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
• Android Studio 4.0 or later: Android Studio is the main development tool for Android. You can download the latest version of Android Studio for free here: https://developer.android.com/studio
• An intermediate level knowledge of Kotlin and Android development. This book is about learning RxJava specifically; to understand the rest of the project code and how the accompanying demo projects work you will need at least an intermediate understanding of Kotlin and the Android SDK.

All the Android sample projects in this book will work just fine in an Android emulator bundled with Android Studio, or you can also use a physical Android device.