Gain insights into Kotlin language essentials and delve into design patterns and best practices. Discover functional programming techniques to enhance code reuse, robustness, and build reliable, scalable projects.

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Design patterns enable developers to speed up the development process by providing proven development paradigms. Reusing design patterns helps prevent complex issues that can cause major problems. Moreover, it improves your codebase, promotes code reuse, and makes an architecture more robust.

In this course, you will start with a gentle introduction of the Kotlin language. You will explore design patterns that are part of the best practices that help developers use Kotlin efficiently. Design patterns appeared in the era of object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java. You will learn the language features that Kotlin provides, which allow developers to program in a functional style and implement the design patterns.

After taking this course, you’ll be able to take your knowledge of Kotlin, design patterns, and associated best practices to the software industry and apply it to build reliable, scalable, and maintainable projects.

Kotlin Design Patterns and Best Practices

Nulls are unavoidable, especially if we work with Java libraries or get data from a database. We've already discussed that there are different ways to check whether a variable contains `null` in Kotlin; for example:



// Will return "String" half of the time and null the other half

val stringOrNull: String? = if (Random.nextBoolean())
"String" else null

// Java-way check
if (stringOrNull != null) {
   println(stringOrNull.length)
}


We could rewrite this code using the Elvis operator (`?:`):

```
val alwaysLength = stringOrNull?.length ?: 0
```

If the length is not `null`, this operator will return its value. Otherwise, it will return the default value we supplied, which is `0` in this case.

If we have a nested object, we can chain those checks. For example, let's have a `Response` object that contains a `Profile`, which, in turn, contains the first name and last name fields, which can be nullable:



Learn how to efficiently handle nulls in Kotlin code and how can we make asynchronicity explicit.

Getting Started with Kotlin

Working with Creational Patterns

Understanding Structural Patterns

Getting Familiar with Behavioral Patterns

Introducing Functional Programming

Threads and Coroutines

Controlling the Data Flow

Designing for Concurrency

Idioms and Anti-Patterns

Concurrent Microservices with Ktor

Reactive Microservices with Vert.x

Conclusion

Dealing with Nulls and Making Asynchronicity Explicit

Dealing with nulls