Appendix A. Introduction to Scala
Scala is a powerful combination of both object oriented and functional programming approaches, and its language constructs can often seem somewhat terse to newcomers. This appendix aims to give you a rough guide to Scala and serve as enough background for you to make full use of this book. Understand that this is only a top-level view of Scala features and it can’t cover anywhere near all of Scala’s capabilities. For a more detailed introduction to the broader language, I suggest picking up a copy of Nilanjan Raychaudhuri’s Scala in Action, also from Manning.
As a language, Scala only has a few core features. The vast majority of features are implemented as libraries, which results in a language that has a very tight core. The following sections cover this core of features that are then used to build the rest of the standard library.
Scala uses a range of mechanisms to allocate objects in memory, and if you’ve programmed in nearly any other language, you’ll be familiar with the concept of a variable. It’s an item that you typically assign something (like a string) to, and then reference (and possibly mutate) at a later stage in your program.
To create variables in Scala you can do the following:
This provides a means to create a variable, which can be mutated later in your application code.