Book Image

Scala Functional Programming Patterns

By : S. Khot
Book Image

Scala Functional Programming Patterns

By: S. Khot

Overview of this book

Scala is used to construct elegant class hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility and to implement their behavior using higher-order functions. Its functional programming (FP) features are a boon to help you design “easy to reason about” systems to control the growing software complexities. Knowing how and where to apply the many Scala techniques is challenging. Looking at Scala best practices in the context of what you already know helps you grasp these concepts quickly, and helps you see where and why to use them. This book begins with the rationale behind patterns to help you understand where and why each pattern is applied. You will discover what tail recursion brings to your table and will get an understanding of how to create solutions without mutations. We then explain the concept of memorization and infinite sequences for on-demand computation. Further, the book takes you through Scala’s stackable traits and dependency injection, a popular technique to produce loosely-coupled software systems. You will also explore how to currying favors to your code and how to simplify it by de-construction via pattern matching. We also show you how to do pipeline transformations using higher order functions such as the pipes and filters pattern. Then we guide you through the increasing importance of concurrent programming and the pitfalls of traditional code concurrency. Lastly, the book takes a paradigm shift to show you the different techniques that functional programming brings to your plate. This book is an invaluable source to help you understand and perform functional programming and solve common programming problems using Scala’s programming patterns.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Summary

Scala is expressive and rich with tools that help us to eliminate boilerplates. It allows us to concisely express the intention of programming. Functions help us reuse the common facilities, freeing us from coding them every time.

Pure functions are simpler to reason about, as there are lot less moving parts. We can think of them in terms of referential transparency. Impure functions are hard to reason with. We saw how making things immutable also helps in reducing these moving parts.

Idioms are what make us use a language effectively. This is true for programming languages. Scala is a feature-rich functional programming language. We got a bird's eye view of a few Scala features, such as recursion and functions.

Design patterns are a programmer's vocabulary. Scala gives us a fresh perspective of patterns, and we saw how the use of functions makes using design patterns so very easy in Scala.

We implemented the solution to a problem in Java and Scala. We saw how succinct and expressive the Scala code is compared to its Java counterpart.

We got our feet wet in the Scala land. Let's look at these features in detail and see how Scala makes programming cool and fun again. We will start with singleton and factories. Get, set, and go!