Book Image

Learning D

By : Michael Parker
Book Image

Learning D

By: Michael Parker

Overview of this book

D is a modern programming language that is both powerful and efficient. It combines multiple paradigms in a way that opens up a whole new world of software design. It is used to develop both desktop and web applications, with future targets including mobile, and is available on multiple platforms. It is familiar to anyone with some experience in one or more of the C-family languages. However, hidden in the similarities are several differences that can be surprising when trying to apply common idioms from other languages. When learning D on your own, this can make it more time-consuming to master. In order to make the most of the language and become an idiomatic D programmer, it’s necessary to learn how to think in D. This book familiarizes you with D from the ground up, with a heavy focus on helping you to avoid surprises so that you can take your D knowledge to the next level more quickly and painlessly. Your journey begins with a taste of the language and the basics of compiling D programs with DMD, the reference D compiler developed by Digital Mars, and DUB, a community-developed build utility and package manager. You then set out on an exploration of major language features. This begins with the fundamentals of D, including built-in types, conditionals, loops and all of the basic building-blocks of a D program, followed by an examination of D’s object-oriented programming support. You’ll learn how these features differ from languages you may already be familiar with. Next up are D’s compile-time features, such as Compile-Time Function Evaluation and conditional compilation, then generic programming with templates. After that, you’ll learn the more advanced features of ranges and functional pipeline programming. To enhance your D experience, you are next taken on a tour of the D ecosystem and learn how to make D interact with C. Finally, you get a look at D web development using the vibe.d project and the book closes with some handy advice on where to go next.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning D
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

About the Reviewers

John Loughran Colvin is an avid programmer and active member of the D community with multiple projects in flight, including a collaboration aiming to build a comprehensive base for scientific programming in D (http://dlangscience.github.io/).

Jonathan M Davis is the primary author of std.datetime in D's standard library, Phobos, and is one of Phobos' core contributors. He is a professional developer and has experience in a number of programming languages, including C++, Haskell, Java, and D. For better or worse, he's well known in the D community for answering questions and being long-winded. He currently resides in California.

Kingsley Hendrickse is a polyglot software developer who specializes in building software using agile principles. His career began in the late '90s where he focused primarily on functional and automated testing but gradually expanded into agile and software engineering while working at ThoughtWorks.

After many years programming in Ruby and Java, he was introduced to the D language while looking for new challenges. He has a wide range of development interests and is currently focusing on web development using Scala, D, and JavaScript using a functional programming style.

He has spent the last decade working for a wide range of prominent banking and financial companies.

Steven Schveighoffer has a bachelors degree in computer science from WPI, and has 16 years of experience working on various systems from small microcontrollers to enterprise servers. He has been active in the D community since 2007 and has made several major contributions to the D language and runtime.

Steve is a principal software engineer at National Resource Management Inc., an energy savings company (http://www.nrminc.com/).