Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By : Samuel Urbanowicz
Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By: Samuel Urbanowicz

Overview of this book

For developers who prefer a more simplistic approach to coding, Kotlin has emerged as a valuable solution for effective software development. The Kotlin standard library provides vital tools that make day-to-day Kotlin programming easier. This library features core attributes of the language, such as algorithmic problems, design patterns, data processing, and working with files and data streams. With a recipe-based approach, this book features coding solutions that you can readily execute. Through the book, you’ll encounter a variety of interesting topics related to data processing, I/O operations, and collections transformation. You’ll get started by exploring the most effective design patterns in Kotlin and understand how coroutines add new features to JavaScript. As you progress, you'll learn how to implement clean, reusable functions and scalable interfaces containing default implementations. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll discover recipes on functional programming concepts, such as lambdas, monads, functors, and Kotlin scoping functions, which will help you tackle a range of real-life coding problems. By the end of this book, you'll be equipped with the expertise you need to address a range of challenges that Kotlin developers face by implementing easy-to-follow solutions.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Wrapping complex type declarations with type aliases

Sometimes we need to deal with long or verbose type declarations. Thankfully, in Kotlin, we are able to assign an alternative name to any existing type and use the shorter alternative name instead. It can also help you to write more understandable and elegant code. This recipe is going to demonstrate how to use type aliases.

Getting ready

Let's assume we have the following two classes predefined:

data class Song(val title: String)
data class Artist(val name: String)

We are going to define a type alias for the map of Song type values and a generic key typeMap<T, List<Song>>. Next, we are going to use it to define a function that will return the most...