Scala Design Patterns - Second Edition

Monads

In functional programming, monads are structures that represent computations as sequences of steps. Monads are useful for building pipelines, adding operations with side effects cleanly to a language where everything is immutable, and implementing compositions. This definition might sound vague and unclear, but explaining monads in a few sentences seems to be something hard to achieve. Later in this book, we will focus on them and try and clear things up without the use of a complex mathematical theory. We will try to show why monads are useful and what they can help with, as long as developers understand them well.