Beginning Scala

ISBN-13: 9781430219897 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 350 str.

David Pollak

Opis

A curious attribute of the Scala programming language is that it expends a lot of expressive power in order to make the life of casual programmers simpler. For instance, Scala provides sophisticated type parametrization and traits so that more advanced programmers can design libraries which are at the same time general and easy to use. Casual users can profit from these libraries long before they discover the full power of Scala's abstraction constructs. The language design avoids the temptation of simply defining some handy primitives in the syntax, even if these primitives would be useful many times to many users. Instead of fixed primitives, the language design tries very hard to provide general construction principles, with which users can then define their own fundamental constructs, at no loss in syntactic convenience. This idea ranges from simple things, such as being able to define your own numeric data types, to full-blown domain-specific APIs such as Scala's support for concurrent actors. There is hardly a better example of this approach than David Pollak's Lift Web Framework for Scala. It leverages the full expressive power of Scala to provide a framework that's at the same time simple to use, powerful, and secure. David has been one of the earliest adopters of Scala. He has become a crystallization point for many important developments in the Scala community. He fostered the vibrant Lift community, organized the first Scala Lift Off conference in 2008, and promoted the adoption of Scala in many important industrial applications.

Spis treści

1. About Scala and How to Install It
2. Scala Syntax, Scripts, and Your First Scala Programs
3. Collections and the Joy of Immutability
4. Fun with Functions, and Never Having to Close That JDBC Connection
5. Pattern Matching
6. Actors and Concurrency
7. Traits and Types and Gnarly Stuff for Architects
8. Parsers—Because BNF Is Not Just for Academics Anymore
9. Scaling Your Team

O autorze

David Pollak has been writing commercial software since 1977. He wrote the award-winning Mesa spreadsheet, which in 1992 was the first real-time spreadsheet. Wall Street companies traded billions of dollars a day through Mesa. In 1996, David sold his company to CMP Media and became CTO of CMP Media's NetGuide Live and was one of the first large-scale users of Java and WebLogic to power an Internet site. In 1998, David released Integer, the world's first browser-accessible, multiuser spreadsheet. Since 2000, David has been consulting for companies including Hewlett-Packard, Pretzel Logic/WebGain, BankServ, Twitter, and SAP. David has been using Scala since 2006 and is the lead developer of the Lift Web framework.