Best Practices in Scala Programming

Anyone starting a project in Scala, expanding a Scala project, or looking to establish coding standards as a means for helping junior Scala programmers come up to speed, will value this overview of Scala best practices by Scala expert Joshua Backfield.

Backfield's extensive experience in both object-oriented programming and functional programming make him a Scala authority. He has ported multiple native C applications to Scala, introduced many coworkers to Scala, and taught them the underlying functional programming concepts. He uses that experience to offer a set of Scala guidelines that should make your Scala code base as great as it can be.

• Review and master the coding standards used by expert Scala programmers
• Learn methods for ensuring that junior level programmers adhere to coding standards
• Understand the norms for var and val usages and functions as objects
• Review standards for immutable vs. mutable data structures and for pattern matching
• Master axioms in OOP for use cases, instance methods, and mixing vs. deep inheritance
• Learn standards for advanced features like avoiding postfix notation and dynamic typing
• Understand best practices for syntax, concurrency, and self-documenting code

Joshua F. Backfield, author of the O'Reilly title Becoming Functional: Steps for Transforming Into a Functional Programmer, has been a Senior Software Engineer at SPARC and Dell SecureWorks. In addition to Scala, his specialties include: Linux, LiftWeb, Squeryl, Java, Spring MVC, Spring, JAX-WS, C, C++, Perl, MySQL, BSD Socket, Functional Programming, and Akka. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University and a B.S. in Electronic Systems from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.