Scala Programming for Big Data Analytics

Book excerpt: Gain the key language concepts and programming techniques of Scala in the context of big data analytics and Apache Spark. The book begins by introducing you to Scala and establishes a firm contextual understanding of why you should learn this language, how it stands in comparison to Java, and how Scala is related to Apache Spark for big data analytics. Next, you’ll set up the Scala environment ready for examining your first Scala programs. This is followed by sections on Scala fundamentals including mutable/immutable variables, the type hierarchy system, control flow expressions and code blocks. The author discusses functions at length and highlights a number of associated concepts such as functional programming and anonymous functions. The book then delves deeper into Scala’s powerful collections system because many of Apache Spark’s APIs bear a strong resemblance to Scala collections. Along the way you’ll see the development life cycle of a Scala program. This involves compiling and building programs using the industry-standard Scala Build Tool (SBT). You’ll cover guidelines related to dependency management using SBT as this is critical for building large Apache Spark applications. Scala Programming for Big Data Analytics concludes by demonstrating how you can make use of the concepts to write programs that run on the Apache Spark framework. These programs will provide distributed and parallel computing, which is critical for big data analytics. What You Will LearnSee the fundamentals of Scala as a general-purpose programming languageUnderstand functional programming and object-oriented programming constructs in ScalaUse Scala collections and functions Develop, package and run Apache Spark applications for big data analyticsWho This Book Is For Data scientists, data analysts and data engineers who intend to use Apache Spark for large-scale analytics. /div