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

Composition and inheritance


In programming terms, to inherit or extend our classes we use the extends or with keywords. These are essential for the relationship between two or more classes or similar constructs. This association or relation between two classes or similar constructs can be in the form of inheritance (Is-A) or composition (Has-A). They are two different notions but they converge to some extent. In simple words, inheritance is a superclass-subclass relationship where the subclass inherits the implementation of the superclass, whereas composition is when a class depends on another object to provide some or all functionality. With an inheritance relationship, you can use the subclass object wherever superclass is expected. Think of it as this relationship between a Dictionary and a Book class:

class Book(val title: String) 
class Dictionary(name: String) extends Book(name) { 
  // data and behavior 
} 

We can picture the Book and Dictionary relationship as shown in the following...