Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a paradigm specifically designed to deal with the complexity of software development in large projects. It helps developers to keep track of the interdependencies in the code base and changes in its state in runtime. Mastering Functional Programming provides detailed coverage of how to apply the right abstractions to reduce code complexity, so that it is easy to read and understand. Complete with explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, the book begins by covering the basics such as what lambdas are and how to write declarative code with the help of functions. It then moves on to concepts such as pure functions and type classes, the problems they aim to solve, and how to use them in real-world scenarios. You’ll also explore some of the more advanced patterns in the world of functional programming such as monad transformers and Tagless Final. In the concluding chapters, you’ll be introduced to the actor model, which you can implement in modern functional languages, and delve into parallel programming. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply the concepts of functional programming and object-oriented programming (OOP)in order to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

The Cats library for purely functional programming

In this section, we will introduce the library that we will be using for purely functional programming in Scala. It encapsulates frequently encountered type classes, implementations of them for frequently encountered effect types, and some effect types as well.

In this section, we will dive deeper into the structure of the library, and we will see how you can use it in practice. We will be following an example of a Monad type class that we discussed in the previous chapters. We will see how this type class is defined in this library and how it is implemented for its data types.

The structure of the library

The library consists of the top-level package and its subpackages...