Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Alexey Soshin
Book Image

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Alexey Soshin

Overview of this book

This book shows you how easy it can be to implement traditional design patterns in the modern multi-paradigm Kotlin programming language, and takes you through the new patterns and paradigms that have emerged. This second edition is updated to cover the changes introduced from Kotlin 1.2 up to 1.5 and focuses more on the idiomatic usage of coroutines, which have become a stable language feature. You'll begin by learning about the practical aspects of smarter coding in Kotlin, as well as understanding basic Kotlin syntax and the impact of design patterns on your code. The book also provides an in-depth explanation of the classical design patterns, such as Creational, Structural, and Behavioral families, before moving on to functional programming. You'll go through reactive and concurrent patterns, and finally, get to grips with coroutines and structured concurrency to write performant, extensible, and maintainable code. By the end of this Kotlin book, you'll have explored the latest trends in architecture and design patterns for microservices. You’ll also understand the tradeoffs when choosing between different architectures and make informed decisions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Classical Patterns
6
Section 2: Reactive and Concurrent Patterns
11
Section 3: Practical Application of Design Patterns

Chapter 5: Introducing Functional Programming

This chapter will discuss the fundamental principles of functional programming and how they fit into the Kotlin programming language.

As you'll discover, we've already touched on some of the concepts in this chapter, as it would have been hard to discuss the benefits of the language up until now without touching on functional programming concepts such as data immutability and functions as values. But as we did before, we'll look at those features from a different angle.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Reasoning behind the functional approach
  • Immutability
  • Functions as values
  • Expressions, not statements
  • Recursion

After completing this chapter, you'll understand how the concepts of functional programming are embedded in the Kotlin language and when to use them.