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

Summary


This chapter was an introduction to Akka for us. We tried to understand the basic underlying principle of actors. We've covered one of the most important libraries Akka provides, akka-actors. Starting from why we need a library of this sort, to understanding the way we implement Actors in Akka, we covered it all. Then from there, we covered the important supervision strategy in Akka. We talked about and practiced our own custom supervisor strategy. Finally, we had a look at akka-testkit, a testkit provided by Akka. With this, we covered what was needed to understand Akka actors and the basics of it. In the next chapter, we'll focus on how we can handle concurrency in Scala. We know it's importance in modern architecture, so the next chapter will be an exciting one.