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

Chapter 2. Building Blocks of Scala

 

"You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure."

- Gordon B. Hinckley

Our aim as programmers is to provide a solution to a problem through some logical implementation. Programming languages work as a tool for just that. When we implement a solution to a problem, we must be able to describe the problem (specification) so that a programming language can verify (verification) whether the solution indeed solves the problem.

Problem Solution

For implementation, we use various programming constructs, which are basic entities with some syntactic rules. These entities work as building blocks for any programming language. In Scala, we have similar syntax to almost any other programming language. We use keyword/name/classifier/bound-entity. In this chapter, our aim is to get familiar with some of the building blocks. We'll go through:

  • The val and var keywords
  • Literals
  • Data types
  • Type...