| 1.1 Why Scala? | 15 |
| 1.2 Why This Book? | 16 |
| 1.3 How This Book Is Organized | 17 |
| 1.4 Code Snippet and Examples | 19 |
| 1.5 Online Materials | 21 |
package app
object MinimalApplication extends cask.MainRoutes {
@cask.get("/")
def hello() = {
"Hello World!"
}
initialize()
}
Snippet 1.1: a tiny Scala web app, one of many example programs we will encounter in this book
Hands-on Scala teaches you how to use the Scala programming language in a practical, project-based fashion. Rather than trying to develop expertise in the deep details of the Scala language itself, Hands-on Scala aims to develop expertise using Scala in a broad range of practical applications. This book takes you from "hello world" to building interactive websites, parallel web crawlers, and distributed applications in Scala.
The book covers the concrete skills necessary for anyone using Scala professionally: handling files, data serializing, querying databases, concurrency, and so on. Hands-on Scala will guide you through completing several non-trivial projects which reflect the applications you may end up building as part of a software engineering job. This will let you quickly hit the ground running using Scala professionally.
Hands-on Scala assumes you are a software developer who already has experience working in another programming language, and want to quickly become productive working with Scala. If you fall into any of the following categories, this book is for you.
Doing big data processing using software like Apache Spark which is written in Scala
Joining one of the many companies using Scala, and need to quickly get up to speed
Hitting performance limits in Ruby or Python, and looking for a faster compiled language
Working with Java or Go, and looking for a language that allows more rapid development
Already experienced working with Scala, but want to take your skills to the next level
Founding a tech startup, looking for a language that can scale with your company as it grows
Note that this book is not targeted at complete newcomers to programming. We expect you to be familiar with basic programming concepts: variables, integers, conditionals, loops, functions, classes, and so on. We will touch on any cases where these concepts behave differently in Scala, but expect that you already have a basic understanding of how they work.
Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala's static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) runtime lets you build high-performance systems with easy access to a huge ecosystem of tools and libraries.
Scala is a general-purpose programming language, and has been applied to a wide variety of problems and domains:
While Scala has never been as mainstream as languages like Python, Java, or C++, it remains heavily used in a wide range of companies and open source projects.
Scala is a language that scales well from one-line snippets to million-line production codebases, with the convenience of a scripting language and the performance and scalability of a compiled language. Scala's conciseness makes rapid prototyping a joy, while its optimizing compiler and fast JVM runtime provide great performance to support your heaviest production workloads. Rather than being forced to learn a different language for each use case, Scala lets you re-use your existing skills so you can focus your attention on the actual task at hand.
Scala's functional programming style and type-checking compiler helps rule out
entire classes of bugs and defects, saving you time and effort you can instead
spend developing features for your users. Rather than fighting TypeErrors and
NullPointerExceptions in production, Scala surfaces mistakes and issues early
on during compilation so you can resolve them before they impact your bottom
line. Deploy your code with the confidence that you won't get woken up by
outages caused by silly bugs or trivial mistakes.
As a language running on the Java Virtual Machine, Scala has access to the large Java ecosystem of standard libraries and tools that you will inevitably need to build production applications. Whether you are looking for a Protobuf parser, a machine learning toolkit, a database access library, a profiler to find bottlenecks, or monitoring tools for your production deployment, Scala has everything you need to bring your code to production.
The goal of Hands-on Scala is to make a software engineer productive using the Scala programming language as quickly as possible.
Most existing Scala books focus on teaching you the language. However, knowing the minutiae of language details is neither necessary nor sufficient when the time comes to set up a website, integrate with a third-party API, or structure non-trivial applications. Hands-on Scala aims to bridge that gap.
This book goes beyond the Scala language itself, to also cover the various tools and libraries you need to use Scala for typical real-world work. Hands-on Scala will ensure you have the supporting skills necessary to use the Scala language to the fullest.
The chapters in Hands-on Scala are project-based: every chapter builds up to a small project in Scala to accomplish something immediately useful in real-world workplaces. These are followed up with exercises (1.5.3) to consolidate your knowledge and test your intuition for the topic at hand.
In the course of Hands-on Scala, you will work through projects such as:
These projects serve dual purposes: to motivate the tools and techniques you will learn about in each chapter, and also to build up your engineering toolbox. The API clients, web scrapers, file synchronizers, static site generators, web apps, and other projects you will build are all based on real-world projects implemented in Scala. By the end of this book, you will have concrete experience in the specifics tasks common when doing professional work using Scala.
Hands-on Scala starts and ends with working code. The concepts you learn in this book are backed up by over 140 executable code examples that demonstrate the concepts in action, and every chapter ends with a set of exercises with complete executable solutions. More than just a source of knowledge, Hands-on Scala can also serve as a cookbook you can use to kickstart any project you work on in future.
Hands-on Scala acknowledges that as a reader, your time is valuable. Every chapter, section and paragraph has been carefully crafted to teach the important concepts needed and get you to a working application. You can then take your working code and evolve it into your next project, tool, or product.
This book is organized into four parts:
Part I Introduction to Scala is a self-contained introduction to the Scala language. We assume that you have some background programming before, and aim to help translate your existing knowledge and apply it to Scala. You will come out of this familiar with the Scala language itself, ready to begin using it in a wide variety of interesting use cases.
Part II Local Development explores the core tools and techniques necessary for writing Scala applications that run on a single computer. We will cover algorithms, files and subprocess management, data serialization, scripts and build pipelines. This chapter builds towards a capstone project where we write an efficient incremental static site generator using the Scala language.
Part III Web Services covers using Scala in a world of servers and clients, systems and services. We will explore using Scala both as a client and as a server, exchanging HTML and JSON over HTTP or Websockets. This part builds towards two capstone projects: a parallel web crawler and an interactive database-backed chat website, each representing common use cases you are likely to encounter using Scala in a networked, distributed environment.
Part IV Program Design explores different ways of structuring your Scala application to tackle real-world problems. This chapter builds towards another two capstone projects: building a real-time file synchronizer and building a programming-language interpreter. These projects will give you a glimpse of the very different ways the Scala language can be used to implement challenging applications in an elegant and intuitive manner.
Each part is broken down into five chapters, each of which has its own small projects and exercises. Each chapter contains both small code snippets as well as entire programs, which can be accessed via links (1.5) for copy-pasting into your editor or command-line.
The libraries and tools used in this book have their own comprehensive online documentation. Hands-on Scala does not aim to be a comprehensive reference to every possible topic, but instead will link you to the online documentation if you wish to learn more. Each chapter will also make note of alternate sets of libraries or tools that you may encounter using Scala in the wild.
While Hands-on Scala is intended to be read cover-to-cover, you can also pick and choose which specific topics you want to read about. The following diagram shows the dependencies between chapters, so you can chart your own path through the book focusing on the things you are most interested in learning.
In this book, we will be going through a lot of code. As a reader, we expect you to follow along with the code throughout the chapter: that means working with your terminal and your editor open, entering and executing the code examples given. Make sure you execute the code and see it working, to give yourself a feel for how the code behaves. This section will walk through what you can expect from the code snippets and examples.
Our command-line code snippets will assume you are using bash or a compatible
shell like sh or zsh. On
Windows, the shell can be accessed through Windows Subsystem for Linux. All
these shells behave similarly, and we will be using code snippets prefixed by a
$ to indicate commands being entered into the Unix shell:
$ ls
build.sc
foo
mill
$ find . -type f
.
./build.sc
./foo/src/Example.scala
./mill
</> 1.2.bashIn each case, the command entered is on the line prefixed by $, followed by
the expected output of the command, and separated from the next command by an
empty line.
Within Scala, the simplest way to write code is in the Scala REPL
(Read-Eval-Print-Loop). This is an interactive command-line that lets you enter
lines of Scala code to run and immediately see their output. In this book, we
will be using the Ammonite Scala REPL, and code snippets
to be entered into the REPL are prefixed by @:
@ 1 + 1
res0: Int = 2
@ println("Hello World")
Hello World
</> 1.3.scalaIn each case, the command entered is on the line prefixed by @, with the
following lines being the expected output of the command. The value of the
entered expression may be implicitly printed to the terminal, as is the case for
the 1 + 1println.
The Ammonite Scala REPL also supports multi-line input, by enclosing the lines
in a curly brace {}
@ {
println("Hello" + (" " * 5) + "World")
println("Hello" + (" " * 10) + "World")
println("Hello" + (" " * 15) + "World")
}
Hello World
Hello World
Hello World
</> 1.4.scalaThis is useful when we want to ensure the code is run as a single unit, rather than in multiple steps with a delay between them while the user is typing. Installation of Ammonite will be covered in Chapter 2: Setting Up.
Many examples in this book require source files on disk: these may be run as scripts, or compiled and run as part of a larger project. All such snippets contain the name of the file in the top-right corner:
build.sc</> 1.5.scalaimportmill._,scalalib._objectfooextendsScalaModule{defscalaVersion="2.13.2"}
foo/src/Example.scala</> 1.6.scalapackagefooobjectExample{defmain(args:Array[String]):Unit={println("Hello World")}}
We will illustrate changes to the a file via diffs. A diff is a snippet of
code with +-
def hello() = {
- "Hello World!"
+ doctype("html")(
+ html(
+ head(),
+ body(
+ h1("Hello!"),
+ p("World")
+ )
+ )
+ )
}
The above diff represents the removal of one line - "Hello World!"
The following Github repository acts as an online hub for all Hands-on Scala notes, errata, discussion, materials, and code examples:
Every code snippet in this book is available in the snippets folder of the
Hands-on Scala online repository:/
For example the code snippet with the following tag:
</> 1.1.scalaIs available at the following URL:
This lets you copy-paste code where convenient, rather than tediously typing out the code snippets by hand. Note that these snippets may include diffs and fragments that are not executable on their own. For executable examples, this book also provides complete Executable Code Examples (1.5.2).
The code presented in this book is executable, and by following the instructions and code snippets in each chapter you should be able to run and reproduce all examples shown. Hands-on Scala also provides a set of complete executable examples online at:
Each of the examples in the handsonscala repository contains a
/handsonscalareadme file containing the command necessary to run that example.
Throughout the book, we will refer to the online examples via callouts such as:.md
As we progress through each chapter, we will often start from an initial piece of code and modify it via Diffs (1.4.4) or Code Snippets (1.5.1) to produce the final program. The intermediate programs would be too verbose to show in full at every step in the process, but these executable code examples give you a chance to see the complete working code at each stage of modification.
Each example is fully self-contained: following the setup in Chapter 2: Setting Up, you can run the command in each folder's readme and see the
code execute in a self-contained fashion. You can use the working code as a
basis for experimentation, or build upon it to create your own programs and
applications. All code snippets and examples in this book are MIT licensed..md
Starting from chapter 5, every chapter come with some exercises at the end:
Exercise: Tries can come in both mutable and immutable variants. Define an
ImmutableTrie class that has the same methods as the Trie class we
discussed in this chapter, but instead of a def addvarmutable collections.
The goal of these exercises is to synthesize what you learned in the chapter into useful skills. Some exercises ask you to make use of what you learned to write new code, others ask you to modify the code presented in the chapter, while others ask you to combine techniques from multiple chapters to achieve some outcome. These will help you consolidate what you learned and build a solid foundation that you can apply to future tasks and challenges.
The solutions to these exercises are also available online as executable code examples.
The last set of files in the handsonscala Github respository are the
resources: sample data files that are used to exercise the code in a chapter.
These are available at:/handsonscala
For the chapters that make use of these resource files, you can download them by
going to the linked file on Github, clicking the Raw button to view the raw
contents of the file in the browser, and then Cmd/-SCtrl to save the file
to your disk for your code to access.-S
For further help or discussion about this book, feel free to visit our online chat room below. There you may be able to find other readers to compare notes with or discuss the topics presented in this book:
There are also chapter-specific discussion threads, which will be linked to at the end of each chapter. You can use these threads to discuss topics specific to each chapter, without it getting mixed up in other discussion. A full listing of these chapter-specific discussion threads can be found at the following URLs:
This first chapter should have given you an idea of what this book is about, and what you can expect working your way through it. Now that we have covered how this book works, we will proceed to set up your Scala development environment that you will be using for the rest of this book.