[HN Gopher] Hands-On Scala Programming
___________________________________________________________________
Hands-On Scala Programming
Author : lihaoyi
Score : 55 points
Date : 2020-06-04 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (handsonscala.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (handsonscala.com)
| philipkglass wrote:
| I bought this book as soon as it became available. I'd say it is
| an excellent way to dive in to Scala for application development,
| even though at this point it is more of a refresher than an
| introduction for me personally.
|
| I started using Scala at a new job in 2014 with no prior Java/JVM
| experience. I bought Functional Programming in Scala, followed by
| Programming in Scala. FPiS was completely the wrong choice for
| getting up to speed in my new role, though it was academically
| interesting. Programming in Scala was closer to what I needed
| although it didn't deal with larger ecosystem issues. Hands-On
| Scala Programming feels like the book I should have started
| reading the first day I started working in Scala development.
|
| 6 years later, I no longer have the brand-new-user perspective on
| Scala and the JVM ecosystem. Does Hands-On Scala adequately
| prepare someone for the JVM/Java quirks that leak through into
| the Scala environment? I can't tell, anymore. I've internalized
| too much of that knowledge.
|
| Assumed Java knowledge was definitely a rough point for me in the
| first year or so using Scala. If something goes wrong when you're
| fetching Maven dependencies in an SBT based project, and you've
| never used Maven-as-Maven because you never used Java before, you
| may encounter some baffling error messages and lack the context
| to understand where you go next to fix it. I also encountered a
| lot of "Like Java's Foo, but with X" explanations of Scala
| features that didn't help because I never used Java. In the case
| of the problem with Maven dependency failures and baffling error
| messages from SBT, I had to resort to running SBT under strace
| before I found the root cause.
| xgdgsc wrote:
| Great book I can tell from the Contents. I used Scala for
| interactively inspect functions in jar you don't have source
| code. In most of other domains I tend to use other languages with
| a less powerful syntax to collaborate easier with other people.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Easily one of the best technical books I've read. I really
| enjoyed the clear examples and clear writing. Making something
| extremely simple is super important for understanding.
|
| And the lovely typesetting is a huge plus when reading this on my
| laptop. Looks great even when viewing in two-page mode.
|
| Only complaint I can think of is that I'd have liked more
| exercises at the end of each chapter. Ideally with less Sudoku as
| I don't want to have to dive into the rules of a game in order to
| practice the collections programming. But this is really a minor
| nitpick, 5/5 book in general.
| lihaoyi wrote:
| Glad you like the typesetting! I'm a professional web
| developer, among other things, and the typesetting is just HTML
| + Bootstrap CSS 4.4.1, rendered into PDFs using Puppeteer.
| Turned out looking much better than I had hoped!
| p33p wrote:
| Scala is a language I find interesting. Between Spark, Akka, and
| all of the FP, it seems like it has most of the boxes I'd want. I
| have read mixed things about the language though, specifically
| with respect to its future viability and development. Is Scala
| worth learning in 2020?
|
| Are there other languages with a well developed actor model that
| is also performant with numerical computing? That seems like a
| deal breaker with respect to a language like Elixir.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Rust and Actix? I'm not familiar with what other Actor
| frameworks provide though, so Actix may well not count as "well
| developed".
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I don't have much experience with either, but Akka is
| probably way more mature than Actix.
| oytis wrote:
| Hm... Was this posted seven times?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=handsonscala.com
| melling wrote:
| Yes, he finally got traction.
| lihaoyi wrote:
| This was posted once before when it was work in progress, I
| thought it would be nice to put it up again now that it is
| complete :)
|
| In one 400 page book, Hands-on Scala takes you from from
| FizzBuzz, to Sudoku solving, to Websites and API servers, all the
| way to implementing programming languages, actor-based concurrent
| architectures, and massively-parallel web crawling with futures.
| Every chapter has multiple multiple self-contained executable
| examples, and multiple exercises with full executable solutions.
|
| It's a paid book, but the first 5/20 chapters (~100 pages) are
| free to read online or download in PDF/Epub/Mobi formats, as is
| the github repo of 125 executable examples.
|
| Whether you are a Scala newbie or an experienced Scala
| programmer, there's something for everyone in this book. The
| chapters on Actors and Futures in particular are the best
| explanations for the concepts you will find in any language, and
| would be useful even for people not using Scala.
|
| Feel free to check it out!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-04 23:00 UTC)