Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Why so serious about types?


We've seen that knowing what we're doing can save life. But joking aside, if we really think before writing our applications, it can really help. Our programs consist of two ingredients:

Data     |            Operations 

We can perform operations on the data available. At the same time, not all operations can be performed on all sorts of data. That's what difference types make. You don't want to perform an addition operation between an Integer and a String literal. That's why the compiler does not allow us to do that. Even if it assumes you're trying to concatenate the string with the literal, it's not going to give you a result that's not meaningful. That's why defining types make sense.

Let's discuss a few terms that we just mentioned. It's really good that Scala is a statically typed language because it provides us compile time type safety. The code that we write is less prone to runtime errors, because we were so smart and we wrote it that way (we'll learn about...