Important update: RxJS 5.5 brought us Pipeable Operators that eliminate some of the problems noted below. If you can update to TypeScript 2.4, RxJS 5.5, Angular 5 and Angular CLI 1.5, you should definitely go with Pipeable Operators. Angular has some third-party dependencies, one of which is RxJS, a library which makes reactive programming very easy to use. The library is obtained as an npm packag