Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Why do we care about Akka?


With a large amount of data all around us, our computer/processing systems are striving for performance. With multicore architecture and distributed computing, we are achieving high performance with acceptable availability of services. But this cannot be taken for granted; we have come to a point where we already have mechanisms to deal with problems that arise due to either incapability of systems or the programming models we are using.

Due to the advent of multicore architecture, our systems are capable of processing a large amount of data with high performance. But there is a fault in our programming models, which we use to mutate states, and at the same time use several threads to vary the states present in our programs. This has given us a reason to think.

Two or more threads trying to process a particular shared state might cause a deadlock (more on this in Chapter 13, Concurrent Programming in Scala, where we discuss concurrency and threads in more detail...