Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By : Slava Schmidt
Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By: Slava Schmidt

Overview of this book

The second version of Scala has undergone multiple changes to support features and library implementations. Scala 2.13, with its main focus on modularizing the standard library and simplifying collections, brings with it a host of updates. Learn Scala Programming addresses both technical and architectural changes to the redesigned standard library and collections, along with covering in-depth type systems and first-level support for functions. You will discover how to leverage implicits as a primary mechanism for building type classes and look at different ways to test Scala code. You will also learn about abstract building blocks used in functional programming, giving you sufficient understanding to pick and use any existing functional programming library out there. In the concluding chapters, you will explore reactive programming by covering the Akka framework and reactive streams. By the end of this book, you will have built microservices and learned to implement them with the Scala and Lagom framework.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Types of implicits

In Scala, there are a couple of different mechanisms hidden behind the keyword implicit. This list contains implicit parameters, implicit conversions, and implicit classes. They have slightly different semantics and it is important to know in which situations which one is the best fit. Each of these three types deserves a brief overview.

Implicit conversions

The first type of implicit in our list is implicit conversion. They allow you automatically to convert values of one type into values of another type. This implicit conversion is defined as a one-argument method that's marked with the implicit keyword. Implicit conversions are considered to be a somewhat controversial language feature (we will take...