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

Motivation


Before we start learning about immutable and mutable collections in Scala, we'll try to solve a simple problem using powerful methods provided by Scala collections. For that, let's take a look at a scenario:

RESTful APIs

As shown in the preceding image, we have a set of APIs with method types such as GET, POST, and PUT, and their associated URIs. As these are two entities (method and URI), think of all these as a list of tuples. Now we want to segregate them, so we can create a map, as shown in the right column of the preceding image. A map is a collection that stores values in a key-value pair. Hence, on the right side you can see API information as key-value pairs, where key is the method name, and the value is a list of URIs for that particular request type. So, the idea is to convert List[(String, String)] to Map[String, List[String]]. You may want to think about the solution, and come up with your own.

Meanwhile, let's see if Scala helps us in any way with our solution:

object...