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

Traits


What are traits? For those coming from a Java background, it's tempting to see them as interfaces, but in reality they are something different. Trait constructs may look similar but are of a different nature to interfaces in Java. The meaning of the word trait is: a distinguishing quality or characteristic, typically one belonging to a person. One of the purposes of traits is the same. What if you want to add a particular characteristic to our hierarchy of classes or a single class? You can do this by extending or mixing in a trait. It's easier to say that we mix-in traits rather than extend from them. How are these two different? We'll talk about this as we go along but for now, let's take a look at how we define a trait in Scala:

trait Socialize { 
  
  //people who socialise, greets. 
  def greet(name: String) = "Hello " + name
}

Look at it this way. One of the qualities of people who tend to socialize well is that they greet you wholeheartedly when they meet you. In programming...