[angular] what is .subscribe in angular?

In Angular (currently on Angular-6) .subscribe() is a method on the Observable type. The Observable type is a utility that asynchronously or synchronously streams data to a variety of components or services that have subscribed to the observable.

The observable is an implementation/abstraction over the promise chain and will be a part of ES7 as a proposed and very supported feature. In Angular it is used internally due to rxjs being a development dependency.

An observable itself can be thought of as a stream of data coming from a source, in Angular this source is an API-endpoint, a service, a database or another observable. But the power it has is that it's not expecting a single response. It can have one or many values that are returned.

Link to rxjs for observable/subscribe docs here: https://rxjs-dev.firebaseapp.com/api/index/class/Observable#subscribe-

Subscribe takes 3 methods as parameters each are functions:

• next: For each item being emitted by the observable perform this function
• error: If somewhere in the stream an error is found, do this method
• complete: Once all items are complete from the stream, do this method

Within each of these, there is the potentional to pipe (or chain) other utilities called operators onto the results to change the form or perform some layered logic.

In the simple example above:

.subscribe(hero => this.hero = hero); basically says on this observable take the hero being emitted and set it to this.hero.

Adding this answer to give more context to Observables based off the documentation and my understanding.