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

Summary


In this chapter, we enhanced our knowledge of functions in Scala. We started with the basic method and function definitions, investigated the difference between them, and looked at how Scala treats them. We also saw that Scala is intelligent enough to convert a method to a function whenever needed. Then we took the discussion further and talked about closures. We got to know what closures are and then we had a solid discussion regarding higher-order functions in Scala. That was essential as we were already using higher-order functions and we saw multiple forms of them. Afterwards, we looked at currying and talked about partially applied functions. We know that partially applied functions are different from partial functions and currying. So now we have a solid understanding of functions in Scala because we have investigated them thoroughly.

Now it's time to go further and learn about a few advanced functional constructs. The knowledge gained in this chapter will help us do that in...