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 7. Next Steps in Object-Oriented Scala

"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there."

– Richard Feynman

The idea of companion objects gave us the feeling that it's important to know how your programming language treats the constructs you write. Suppose you were given a task to generate a case class with some sensitive parameters (by sensitive, we mean when trying to print that class, those sensitive fields should print some dummy values). What you are going to do in order to achieve that entirely depends on your knowledge of how Scala treats the case classes, and we learned that in the previous chapter. So, what now? Now it's time to do some composition as well as use inheritance. Remember, we talked about how we should think of a class as a type that we can define? It's a really useful and fun task to mix these types all together and try to make sense out of them and at the same time, add functionalities. That's why we have static typing, isn...