Programming Scala
by Dean Wampler, Alex Payne · first published 2009
36% recommend44% neutral20% critical
Why HN recommends it
Well-organized, readable tour of Scala that follows how developers think about the language; praised as a strong starting point for learning it and enjoyable to read.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
With this book you will learn how to be more productive with Scala, a new multiparadigm language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which integrates features of both object-oriented programming and functional programming. Scala is ideal for highly scalable, component-based applications that support concurrency and distribution.
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I have all the books currently out now on Scala and I think "Programming Scala" by Wampler and Payne is the best one for learning the language: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Scalability-Function... Steer clear of the Artima book: its huge, out of date and not written…
on “Ask HN: What’s the best book/way to learn Scala?” ↗Programming Scala by Alex Payne and Dean Wampler. It's a great companion to the Odersky/Venners book which is (in my view, which is far from unanimous) better as a reference or a follow-up rather than as a tutorial.
on “Buy 1 get 1 sale at O'Reilly. What are some good startup or tech-related books?” ↗…pleasant to write and quite easy to learn, lots of syntactic sugar. I'd say Kotlin is a better language than Groovy. Scala is a very deep language to learn, lots of fascinating features, just reading Programming Scala is amazing and totally recommended. The learning curve is steeper to get to more advanced concepts but it is worth it. Rust is not as difficult to learn as Scala, not so many features and concepts but…
on “Ask HN: Which programming language should a journeyman programmer learn?” ↗"I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." -- James Strachan
on “Should I Learn Scala or Groovy?” ↗Have you read Functional Programming in Scala? https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Scala-Paul-Chi...
on “Ask HN: How to choose functional programming side projects?” ↗Actually you should start out with https://www.amazon.de/Programming-Scala-Martin-Odersky/dp/09... Even when it's targeted at the JVM. Scala.JS usage isn't that hard after you read half of the book.
on “From first principles: Why I bet on Scala.js” ↗As for learning resources, I always loved the Oreilly "Programming Scala" book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033073.do It's one of the few books that is structured in the same way a Scala developer thinks. Lots of Scala books follow the same order: keywords, usual…
on “What's Next for Scala” ↗Programming Scala is one of the best programming books I’ve ever read. Scala never stuck with me, but I’ve gone through the book a couple of times because it’s so well written and enjoyable to read.
on “Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?” ↗Programming Scala 2nd edition and Functional Programming in Scala.
on “Ask HN: What are the latest and greatest books on your favorite language?” ↗…Arrays (a fundamental JVM data-structure with a broken interface) behave like plain Seqs in Scala, while Strings are considered to be lists of chars (as in Haskell or Lisp). I didn't like Alex Payne's "Programming Scala" book. It's boring, it's poorly organized and it's out of date - for instance a big part of it involves dealing with Scala's Actors, but Scala's Actors were terrible, which is why in Scala 2.10 the implementation…
on “Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala” ↗The Wampler & Payne book "Programming Scala" works an example which is absolutely painful. They're able to make a language that sorta-kinda looks like plain English, except that it's based on structurally unstable idioms that would require the…
on “Why Scala seems difficult but really isn’t” ↗…been OK-ish when they appeared and thus recommended by people, either because of lack of other choices, but also because the advice contained was the status quo, but right now are pretty bad choices. "Programming Scala", by Alex Payne, for example is an awful reference to put on any list of books for Scala. It contains bad practices, plus lots of references to obsolete parts of the standard library, not to mention its…
on “Functional programming books review” ↗…language syntax is denser than clojure's; The Odersky/Spoon / Venners is the largest and not an easy book to get thru, but probably authoritative. The Payne/Wampler text freely available online http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ -- haskell: Real World. content freely available online. http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
on “Ask HN: Most applicable functional language to learn?” ↗According to amazon reviews, Beginning Scala and Venkat's Programming Scala assume Java background (which I don't have), O'reilly's Programming Scala looks like a good reference but not a good tutorial (because it's dense and has forward references), and Odersky's Programming…
on “Ask HN: How should I get started with Scala?” ↗Sorry, but Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon and Bill Venners wrote the book on Scala: Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition[1] [1] - http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Comprehensive-Step-S...
on “Moving On” ↗