Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By : Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu
Book Image

Learn Kotlin Programming - Second Edition

By: Stephen Samuel, Stefan Bocutiu

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a general-purpose programming language used for developing cross-platform applications. Complete with a comprehensive introduction and projects covering the full set of Kotlin programming features, this book will take you through the fundamentals of Kotlin and get you up to speed in no time. Learn Kotlin Programming covers the installation, tools, and how to write basic programs in Kotlin. You'll learn how to implement object-oriented programming in Kotlin and easily reuse your program or parts of it. The book explains DSL construction, serialization, null safety aspects, and type parameterization to help you build robust apps. You'll learn how to destructure expressions and write your own. You'll then get to grips with building scalable apps by exploring advanced topics such as testing, concurrency, microservices, coroutines, and Kotlin DSL builders. Furthermore, you'll be introduced to the kotlinx.serialization framework, which is used to persist objects in JSON, Protobuf, and other formats. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed with all the new features in Kotlin and will be able to build robust applications skillfully.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamental Concepts in Kotlin
5
Section 2: Practical Concepts in Kotlin
15
Section 3: Advanced Concepts in Kotlin

Sequences

We defined what a sequence is and what it does at the start of this chapter. Sequences are great for scenarios when the size of the collection is not known in advance. Think about reading a table from a database, where you wouldn't know how many records you will get back, or reading a local .csv file, where you don't know how many lines it contains. You can think of a sequence as a list that goes on and on. A sequence is evaluated on a need-to-know basis, and only to the point that's needed. Think of the Fibonacci series; there is no point in constructing the collection in advance. How many items do you need to compute? The caller determines that.

If you have worked with Scala or Java 8, you will see the sequences as the Kotlin equivalent of Stream types. Since Kotlin supports Java 6 and it doesn't support a streaming library, they had to come with...