Simple play icon Course
Skills

Scala 2 Methods and Functions

by Janani Ravi

Scala is emerging as a popular choice for working with large datasets and frameworks such as Spark. This course will teach you about Scala's support for first-class and higher-order functions and the differences between methods and functions.

What you'll learn

Working with Big Data these days increasingly requires an understanding of functional programming constructs, because of how easily functional code can be distributed. Scala is a general-purpose programming language that runs on the JVM and supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms.

In this course, Scala Methods and Functions, you’ll learn to utilize those aspects of Scala that are specific to the functional programming paradigm.

First, you'll see how variables with different type modifiers are assigned and evaluated and you’ll understand the differences between Scala val, var, lazy val, and def keywords.

Next, you’ll discover the attributes of first-class functions, and the use of higher-order functions and partial functions in order to simplify code design.

Next, you’ll learn how to harness the power of features for Scala methods such as currying, recursion, named and positional arguments, and varargs.

Finally, you'll learn how to deal with missing values and errors in Scala and work with functional error handling idioms such as Try-Success-Failure, Option-Some-None, and Either-Right-Left.

When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of functions and methods in Scala needed to write correct, concise, yet easily understandable code that combines the power of the functional programming paradigm with a strong static type system.

Table of contents

Course Overview
1min

About the author

Janani has a Masters degree from Stanford and worked for 7+ years at Google. She was one of the original engineers on Google Docs and holds 4 patents for its real-time collaborative editing framework. After spending years working in tech in the Bay Area, New York, and Singapore at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Flipkart, Janani finally decided to combine her love for technology with her passion for teaching. She is now the co-founder of Loonycorn, a content studio focused on providing ... more

Ready to upskill? Get started