Manipulating Collections

Handling lists of items is a common occurrence in life as well as in programming languages. When a list has associated functions that help us manipulate the items in the list, we often call that object a collection.

In this chapter, we will see how high-order functions can be used to greatly simplify the task of manipulating collections. We'll see how we can code using functional programming techniques and open source functional packages to create elegant solutions that are not only insightful, but also performant in today's distributed processing environments.

Our goal in this chapter is to:

• Iterate through a collection
• Learn about intermediate and terminal functors
• Use predicates to filter items in a collection
• Test using a Mocha-like BDD library
• Focus on Map functions
• Grasp the breadth of the collection-manipulating functions in Itertools
• Leverage routines and channels to iterate through a collection
• See how we can use Go to process big data collections