Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By : Pascal Bugnion
Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By: Pascal Bugnion

Overview of this book

Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language (it supports both object-oriented and functional programming) and scripting language used to build applications for the JVM. Languages such as R, Python, Java, and so on are mostly used for data science. It is particularly good at analyzing large sets of data without any significant impact on performance and thus Scala is being adopted by many developers and data scientists. Data scientists might be aware that building applications that are truly scalable is hard. Scala, with its powerful functional libraries for interacting with databases and building scalable frameworks will give you the tools to construct robust data pipelines. This book will introduce you to the libraries for ingesting, storing, manipulating, processing, and visualizing data in Scala. Packed with real-world examples and interesting data sets, this book will teach you to ingest data from flat files and web APIs and store it in a SQL or NoSQL database. It will show you how to design scalable architectures to process and modelling your data, starting from simple concurrency constructs such as parallel collections and futures, through to actor systems and Apache Spark. As well as Scala’s emphasis on functional structures and immutability, you will learn how to use the right parallel construct for the job at hand, minimizing development time without compromising scalability. Finally, you will learn how to build beautiful interactive visualizations using web frameworks. This book gives tutorials on some of the most common Scala libraries for data science, allowing you to quickly get up to speed with building data science and data engineering solutions.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Scala for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

When not to use Scala


In the previous sections, we described how Scala's strong type system, preference for immutability, functional capabilities, and parallelism abstractions make it easy to write reliable programs and minimize the risk of unexpected behavior.

What reasons might you have to avoid Scala in your next project? One important reason is familiarity. Scala introduces many concepts such as implicits, type classes, and composition using traits that might not be familiar to programmers coming from the object-oriented world. Scala's type system is very expressive, but getting to know it well enough to use its full power takes time and requires adjusting to a new programming paradigm. Finally, dealing with immutable data structures can feel alien to programmers coming from Java or Python.

Nevertheless, these are all drawbacks that can be overcome with time. Scala does fall short of the other data science languages in library availability. The IPython Notebook, coupled with matplotlib, is an unparalleled resource for data exploration. There are ongoing efforts to provide similar functionality in Scala (Spark Notebooks or Apache Zeppelin, for instance), but there are no projects with the same level of maturity. The type system can also be a minor hindrance when one is exploring data or trying out different models.

Thus, in this author's biased opinion, Scala excels for more permanent programs. If you are writing a throwaway script or exploring data, you might be better served with Python. If you are writing something that will need to be reused and requires a certain level of provable correctness, you will find Scala extremely powerful.