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

Hierarchy of collections in Scala


The hierarchical structure of Scala collections is easy to understand. When you start working with collections, it becomes easy to use any method that is already defined in a super trait, and for specific implementations you can define your own versions. The structure has been classified in three distinct categories, that is: root,mutable, and immutable. We've discussed the differences between them. To strengthen our discussion, let's take a look at the hierarchy of root package collections:

Root collection hierarchy

The preceding hierarchy is for collections in the root package. All the collections inherited from the super trait are called Traversable. Traversable defines the foreach abstract method, along with other helper methods that can relate to any collection in the hierarchy. So, it's clear that every other collection needs to give a definition of the foreach method in its implementation. We'll have a look at Traversable trait in the next few topics...