Mastering the functional and concurrent programming language features supported by modern languages can be challenging, even for experienced developers. For programmers familiar with OOP, for example, these features may appear to be more intimidating than they really are-often because of a misunderstanding of the underlying concepts. In Functional and Concurrent Programming: Core Concepts and Features, Michel Charpentier introduces a core set of powerful programming language constructs that have been implemented in a variety of languages. Charpentier illustrates key concepts with numerous small, focused code examples, written in Scala 3, in addition to larger case studies that range from beginner to intermediate level. The goal of these examples and case studies is to provide a thorough grounding in functional and concurrent programming skills that will carry from language to language-including the most recent incarnations of Java. Programmers new to these techniques will gain confidence and develop a deeper understanding of concepts and abstractions that have become ubiquitous.
Key topics covered include: recursion, pattern matching, persistent structures and immutability, higher-order functions and lambda expressions, lazy evaluation and streams, Currying, closures, functional error handling, threads and thread pools, atomicity, synchronization, locks and lock-free algorithms, futures and promises, and a combination of functional and concurrent programming that relies on non-blocking transformations of futures via higher-order functions. As a bonus, the book includes a discussion of common typing strategies used in modern programming languages, including type inference, subtyping, polymorphism, type classes, type bounds and type variance.
Experienced developers-no matter what language they are using-will benefit from using these functional and concurrent programming language features to produce high-quality code that is often faster to develop and easier to understand, debug, optimize, and evolve.
