Scala Learning Resources

Like any new technology, Scala and its ecosystem take a while to master and can be frustrating at times. Don't get discouraged! Here are some resources to help.

• Popular IDEs are IntelliJ IDEA with the Scala plugin and Visual Studio Code with the Scala (Metals) extension. If you're unsure which to choose, go with IntelliJ.
• Functional vs Imperative Programming

The core of Functional Programming is thinking about data-flow rather than control-flow. Although, by virtue of editing plain text, you are forced to order your code in a linear sequence of statements, those statements are a thin skin over what you really care about: the shape and structure of the data-flow graph within your program.

• Tour of Scala — A tour of bite-sized introductions to the most frequently used features of Scala intended for newcomers to the language.
• Scala: The Good Parts — Scala allows you to accomplish tasks in different ways. This blog post explains some of the more readable, maintainable approaches.
• Scala Best Practices — Rather than using random examples from Scala projects in the wild, these are meant as an evolving "best" way of doing things.
• 💻 Scala Exercises — An Open Source project for learning different Scala technologies. Generally relevant are the "Scala Tutorial", "Std Lib", and "Cats" exercises.
• 📖 Scala for the Impatient — An approachable book (384 pages and you can skip the chapters on XML and Parsers) for experienced Java/C++/C# developers who are new to Scala or functional programming. It introduces key Scala concepts and techniques in order to be productive quickly.

Tools/Libraries

• sbt — Scala Build Tool, similar to Gradle for Java.
• Scalafmt — Code formatter, similar to Prettier for JavaScript.
• Scalafix — Refactoring and linting tool, similar to ESLint for JavaScript.
• ScalaTest — Testing tool, similar to JUnit for Java.
• mockito-scala — Test mocking, a Scala-friendly API over Java's Mockito.
• Cats — Short for "category", provides functional programming abstractions. The homepage provides a Jump Start Guide, Type Class and Date Type documentation, and motivations behind the library. — 📖 Scala with Cats — Free e-book available in HTML, PDF, and ePUB formats introducing the Cats library.
• Akka and Akka Streams — A toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications.
• Alpakka — An Akka Streams-based library used to publish and subscribe to SQS, S3, Kafka, etc. with built-in back pressure support.
• Slick — A reactive, functional object-relational mapper (ORM).