Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By : Slava Schmidt
Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By: Slava Schmidt

Overview of this book

The second version of Scala has undergone multiple changes to support features and library implementations. Scala 2.13, with its main focus on modularizing the standard library and simplifying collections, brings with it a host of updates. Learn Scala Programming addresses both technical and architectural changes to the redesigned standard library and collections, along with covering in-depth type systems and first-level support for functions. You will discover how to leverage implicits as a primary mechanism for building type classes and look at different ways to test Scala code. You will also learn about abstract building blocks used in functional programming, giving you sufficient understanding to pick and use any existing functional programming library out there. In the concluding chapters, you will explore reactive programming by covering the Akka framework and reactive streams. By the end of this book, you will have built microservices and learned to implement them with the Scala and Lagom framework.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Understanding Types in Scala

The strong type system is one of the most important parts of the Scala language. Like a double-edged sword, it helps the compiler to verify and optimize the code on one side, while at the same time guiding developers toward possible correct implementations and preventing them from making programming mistakes on another side. As with any sharp tool, it requires some skill so that it can be used for carving beautiful source code without cutting the user in the process.

In this chapter, we will improve this skill by recapping and summarizing basic type-related knowledge, taking a look at a new type that was introduced in Scala 2.13, and finally looking at some advanced usages of types.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Different ways to create a type
  • Different ways to parameterize a type
  • Kinds of types
  • Using types to express domain...