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

Currying


Scala allows you to pass multiple parameters in functions or methods. We may want to create intermediate versions of such functions. This gives us more than one version of a single function. In other words, we can break down every function with multiple parameters into single parameter functions. Why would we want to create single parameter functions? The answer to this is, we can leverage it for function composition. For example, we can launch a website with the help of a domain name, hosting, and web platform. See the following example:

WebsitePlatform => DomainName => Host 

If you have a function that takes a domain name, another function that takes a website platform, and another function that takes a hosting platform as a parameter, you can compose them together to have a full-fledged website. Functional composition is powerful because it gives you more options together with intermediate functions. A normal function would look like the following:

def makeWebsite(platform...