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

Introduction to web frameworks


This section is a brief introduction to how modern web applications are designed. Go ahead and skip it if you already feel comfortable writing backend code.

Loosely, a web framework is a set of tools and code libraries for building web applications. To understand what a web framework provides, let's take a step back and think about what you would need to do if you did not have one.

You want to write a program that listens on port 80 and sends HTML (or JSON or XML) back to clients that request it. This is simple if you are serving the same file back to every client: just load the HTML from file when you start the server, and send it to clients who request it.

So far, so good. But what if you now want to customize the HTML based on the client request? You might choose to respond differently based on part of the URL that the client put in his browser, or based on specific elements in the HTTP request. For instance, the product page on amazon.com is different to the...