Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By : Prokopec
Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By: Prokopec

Overview of this book

Scala is a modern, multiparadigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala smoothly integrates the features of object-oriented and functional languages. In this second edition, you will find updated coverage of the Scala 2.12 platform. The Scala 2.12 series targets Java 8 and requires it for execution. The book starts by introducing you to the foundations of concurrent programming on the JVM, outlining the basics of the Java Memory Model, and then shows some of the classic building blocks of concurrency, such as the atomic variables, thread pools, and concurrent data structures, along with the caveats of traditional concurrency. The book then walks you through different high-level concurrency abstractions, each tailored toward a specific class of programming tasks, while touching on the latest advancements of async programming capabilities of Scala. It also covers some useful patterns and idioms to use with the techniques described. Finally, the book presents an overview of when to use which concurrency library and demonstrates how they all work together, and then presents new exciting approaches to building concurrent and distributed systems. Who this book is written for If you are a Scala programmer with no prior knowledge of concurrent programming, or seeking to broaden your existing knowledge about concurrency, this book is for you. Basic knowledge of the Scala programming language will be helpful.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Chapter 1. Introduction

 

"For over a decade prophets have voiced the contention that the organization of a single computer has reached its limits and that truly significant advances can be made only by interconnection of a multiplicity of computers."

 
 --Gene Amdahl, 1967

Although the discipline of concurrent programming has a long history, it has gained a lot of traction in recent years with the arrival of multi core processors. The recent development in computer hardware not only revived some classical concurrency techniques but also started a major paradigm shift in concurrent programming. At a time when concurrency is becoming so important, an understanding of concurrent programming is an essential skill for every software developer.

This chapter explains the basics of concurrent computing and presents some Scala preliminaries required for this book. Specifically, it does the following:

  • Shows a brief overview of concurrent programming
  • Studies the advantages of using Scala when it comes to concurrency
  • Covers the Scala preliminaries required for reading this book

We will start by examining what concurrent programming is and why it is important.