Hands-on Scala Programming: Learn Scala in a Practical, Project-Based Way

The content is eminently practical, but my copy has a problem: I haven't finished reading it and there are multiple pages falling off.So It's going to be difficult to go back to this as reference. Not what I would expect from a ~£35 book, even technical and specialised like this one. What a shame.

This book teaches you how to get stuff done with Scala. It's very practical. It teaches you the basics of the language, how to perform filesystem operations, how to work with JSON, building projects, etc. Sounds unremarkable, like a standard book.Li is the author of the libraries covered in the book. As you turn the pages, you'll see how his libraries can be combined to solve difficult problems with a tiny bit of code. If you're an experienced Scala programmer, you'll see how elegant the solutions are compared to the standard approaches.You'll start seeing that this book is more of a magnum opus. A culmination of year of open source Scala work.It's mind opening. You'll see how public interfaces should be exposed and how complex logic should be encapsulated. Li provides hints at underlying implementations that make you appreciate the power of the Scala programming language.Scala has an ardent fanbase that's struggled to communicate why they love Scala so much. They stand on the rooftops to preach the power of Scala and are met with blank stares.The difficulty communicating the power of a language to "average" language users is nothing new and is know as the Blub Paradox. Programmers can't understand the benefits of languages that are higher on the power continuum than the language they use.This book shows you the power of the Scala programming language. It moves you up the language power continuum.This is no small feat. The Scala community has been trying to explain why Scala is such a great language for years. Their efforts have largely failed.The power of Scala is revealed gradually with practical examples. You'll learn how to deserialized a JSON object and think, "wow, Scala is really good for parsing strings into ASTs". Then, you'll see how to generate HTML with a Scala DSL and realize appreciate Scala's DSL capabilities. By the end of the book, you'll be able to implement a programming language in 70 lines of code. Every chapter provides an "aha moment", after the introductory chapters.You'll understand why some developers absolutely love Scala after reading this book.The book can be read in a piecemeal fashion. You can open the book, read Chapter 8 on JSON and then read chapter 15 on databases if those are the topics you're interested in.The first six chapters of the book are nothing extraordinary - they're solid, but just cover the basics of the language. There's not much you can do when you're introducing the if/else syntax of a language. Experienced Scala programmers can just skip the first 6 chapters.The magic starts happening on Chapter 7: Files and Subprocesses. You'll cover Li's open source os-lib, upickle, scalatags, and mill libraries and see a whole new way to write Scala code.I bought the physical book and the print quality is good. The syntax highlighting makes the code easy to read. You'll love this book.

This is one of the most amazing books that I have. And I have a lot. Not just for the contents, but examples, the examples, the incremental changes way. Illustrations and color highlighting are remarkable as well.

Those who used author's libraries notice how exceptionally easy they are compared to similar libraries from the Scala world. There is a certain philosophy around these tools not necessarily common amongst the Scala community that Scala is a simple language. You don't have to be a mathematician with an exceptional knowledge of the category theory and lambda calculus to start coding in Scala. It is not required to overcomplicate things when coding in Scala (although entirely possible if you with to do that). You can do everything in an easy way just like in Python and this book will walk you through a lot of production scenarios with that philosophy in mind.

A well written and structured book about programming with Scala. Each capture builds to a capstone project and uses colored diffs to show the changes to the code as you progress. Whether you’re new to Scala or looking for a refresher or some fresh takes, this is definitely the book for you!

A very insightful book, with practical examples on the construction of the most common components or algorithms in the day-to-day creation of solution architectures.