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 6. Object-Oriented Scala Basics

"There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit of a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is subjective and precise."

- The Timeless Way of Building

Scala is an obvious choice for many programmers because of the goodies it contains. It's a language that's functional as well as object-oriented, which means a lot to programmers. It gives us a way of building our applications in a modular and meaningful fashion. It's important to know that Scala's functional concepts are essential, powerful, and at the core of our programs. There is no doubt that algebraic data types have provided the essential abstractions and immutable data structures that have allowed the code to work in a concurrent environment. But real-world applications could need much more than that. Often, the amount of code we write makes it essential to have a way of managing it. That's where object-oriented abstractions come to the rescue. It's great...