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Resources for Learning Scala

Getting started with a new programming language shouldn’t be hard, however navigating the web for resources on getting started with Scala can be a doubting experience, as many such resources are either out of date, or wrong, or both. This post is intended to reduce the noise for my colleagues and other people that are interested in Scala development.

1. Tools of the Trade

All you need for getting started is the Scala interpreter and a good text editor.

First, download the archive from scala-lang.org/downloads, uncompress it and place the bin/ subdirectory on your local PATH. Then start the “scala” interpreter and test if it works:

$ scala
Welcome to Scala version 2.10.1
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.
scala> 1 + 1
res0: Int = 2

You also need a good and simple text editor that can do syntax highlighting for Scala. Your choice should be done in this order:

  • your existing favorite text editor, if you have one
  • Sublime Text 2 for a good out-of-the-box experience, although for reasons I won’t go into here, I really keep away from text-editors that aren’t open-source
  • Vim or Emacs (in combination with scala-mode2 and yasnippet). These text editors are eternal and extremely productive, however if you’re unfamiliar with neither of them, adding the overhead of learning them on top of learning Scala is a bit too much

Other tools you may need for serious development ™, but not necessarily for learning:

  • SBT for building projects and managing dependencies, being much like Maven for Java, or Leiningen for Clojure, or Rake+Bundler for Ruby
  • IntelliJ IDEA, in combination with the sbt-idea plugin, if you need a good IDE, but seriously, when getting your feet wet, stay away from IDEs. The community edition is open-source and fit for Scala development
  • Typesafe Activator is a pretty recent development if you want to play with the TypeSafe stack (which really means the Play Framework and Akka). I haven’t played with it, but it looks like a neat way to get some sample apps running quickly. It also includes SBT.

But really, for playing around, start with just the Scala compiler + a text editor that does syntax highlighting for Scala. I can’t stress this enough.

2. Books

For getting started, at the moment (May 2013) ignore all books (seriously) other than these 3:

Scala for the Impatient by Cay S. Horstmann, is a good pragmatic book on Scala (not so much on functional programming), but it’s for developers experienced in other languages, so it’s fast-paced while not scaring you away with endless discussions on types. The PDF for the first part (out of 3) is available from the Typesafe website.

Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky is a good book on programming, not just Scala - many of the exercises in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs are also present in this book, giving you the Scala-approach for solving those problems, which is good.

Scala in Depth by Joshua Suereth D. - this is an advanced book on Scala, with many insights into how functional idioms work in it or advice on best practices. I’ve yet to finish it, as it’s not really an easy lecture. But it’s a good book. Get the eBook straight from Manning.

NOTE: these are Amazon links (with my affiliate tag) placed here for convenience and for reading other people’s reviews, but if you want the eBook version don’t buy from Amazon, prefer buying directly from the publisher, as you’ll get both a DRM-free Kindle version and a PDF, useful for desktops or iPads.

3. Online Resources

An unspoken rule when searching for online resources about Scala is that you should stay away from the www.scala-lang.org website, because many links are outdated and the website is not properly maintained, as most of the effort these days is going to the documention project (mentioned below), which will probably become the homepage for Scala at some point.

Functional Programming Principles in Scala is an excellent course provided by Coursera / EPFL, taught by Martin Odersky. The course is almost over, so register right now if you want access to the videos and assignments, or you’ll probably have to wait for the next iteration.

Scala Documentation Project - definitely checkout this website, as they aggregate everything good here. If you want to learn more about Scala’s library, especially the collections, this is the place to learn from. Checkout for instance this Scala cheatsheet.

Scala School - a freely available online tutorial by Twitter, which is very friendly to newbies. I’ve read it and it’s pretty good.

Ninety-Nine Scala Problems - a collection of 99 problems to be solved with Scala. If you get stuck, you can view a solution which is often idiomatic. See also this GitHub project that gives you a complete test-suite, to spare you of the effort. Project Euler is also a pretty cool source of problems to solve.

The Scala Overview at StackOverflow.com is a pretty cool aggregate of popular Scala questions. I don’t know if they are compiling this automatically, or by hand, but it almost feels like an online book.

Online videos from nescala.org. These presentations are pure gold and a must see. At the moment, the homepage features the videos from 2013, so start with the 2012 archive.

4. Whom to Follow

The Typesafe Blog usually contains news regarding Scala adoptions in the enterprise, or release announcements about Akka, Play, Scala-IDE, or whatever Typesafe is doing these days and it’s useful to follow their RSS feed.

This Week in #Scala is a weekly-ish article series written by Chris Cundill of Cake Solutions, aggregating the most interesting news happening in the Scala community. I subscribed to their newsletter.

My Twitter and my RSS feed does have subscriptions to interesting people from the Scala community, however following people tends to add noise to your news stream. If you want to learn Scala, then following people’s blogs and tweats is a waist of time.

5. Seeking Help

For seeking help for language usage:

For seeking help related to usage of various Scala frameworks or libraries, you may want to subscribe to their specific mailing-list. For instance play-framework for problems related to the Play framework.