Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By : Samuel Urbanowicz
Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By: Samuel Urbanowicz

Overview of this book

For developers who prefer a more simplistic approach to coding, Kotlin has emerged as a valuable solution for effective software development. The Kotlin standard library provides vital tools that make day-to-day Kotlin programming easier. This library features core attributes of the language, such as algorithmic problems, design patterns, data processing, and working with files and data streams. With a recipe-based approach, this book features coding solutions that you can readily execute. Through the book, you’ll encounter a variety of interesting topics related to data processing, I/O operations, and collections transformation. You’ll get started by exploring the most effective design patterns in Kotlin and understand how coroutines add new features to JavaScript. As you progress, you'll learn how to implement clean, reusable functions and scalable interfaces containing default implementations. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll discover recipes on functional programming concepts, such as lambdas, monads, functors, and Kotlin scoping functions, which will help you tackle a range of real-life coding problems. By the end of this book, you'll be equipped with the expertise you need to address a range of challenges that Kotlin developers face by implementing easy-to-follow solutions.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Implementing builders the smart way

The Builder design pattern is one of the most commonly used mechanisms for instantiating complex types in the Java language. It was strongly recommended by Joshua Bloch in the Effective Java book. Bloch says the builders should be used when we need to implement multiple constructors. He also mentions that builder pattern simulates named optional parameters. However, in Kotlin, those arguments for implementing a specialized builder class are no longer valid. Kotlin allows us to provide default values to the class constructor arguments and properties and it has built-in support for named arguments. Given those Kotlin features, there is no need to implement the builders in most scenarios since we can simply achieve their functionality using the language's built-in concepts. However, in Kotlin, we can adapt the Builder pattern to achieve even...