Functional Programming in Scala

Course Details:

An intermediate college-level series of four classes which taught how to write elegant functional codes and develop more sophisticated programming skills. Emphasis was placed on best practices and writing good Scala code in real world situations.

Functional Programming Principles in Scala:

• Compared functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming styles
• Wrote purely functional programs, using recursion, currying, pattern matching, polymorphism, and higher-order functions
• Designed immutable data structures and recognized when they were superior or inferior to mutable data structures

Functional Programming Design in Scala:

• Applied new functional programming techniques, including monads, loops, state space exploration, for-comprehensions, randomized testing, and functional reactive programming
• Combined functional programming with objects and classes
• Applied design principles of functional programs
• Utilized lazy evaluation techniques to handle large, combinatorial search spaces and infinite lists

Parallel Programming:

• Wrote programs that effectively used parallel programming across both data and threads to achieve enhanced performance
• Microbenchmarked parallel code
• Converted problems expressed functionally to solve them in parallel
• Traced execution of common Scala methods such as map and reduce when running in parallel

Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark:

• Analyzed how data-parallel and distributed data-parallel, as well as Spark's RDD's and Scala's collections, differ
• Manipulated and analyzed data with Scala, Apache Spark, and Spark SQL, from large data sets on multicore architectures to distributed data on a computational cluster
• Avoided shuffles and recomputation and minimized the effect of latency in Spark through partitioning, reductions, joins, and careful ordering of such methods