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


It's time to conclude our chapter. In this chapter, we had a brief introduction to the important concept of functions in Scala. We started with the syntax for defining a function. It is important to know that we're allowed to nest functions and make our code look cleaner. We learned about how we can make function calls in a variety of ways, for example with a variable number of arguments, with a default parameter value, and with a named argument. Then we learned how to write function literals in Scala. Afterwards, we discussed a couple of evaluation strategies for functions in Scala, where we talked about call by name and call by value. Finally, we discussed another important concept of defining a partial function in Scala.

With this chapter, we have completed the first part of our journey. Learning all these concepts has certainly increased our ability to write and understand a mature piece of Scala code. In later parts, we will continue to do so. The second part is about Scala's...