It passed almost 5 months since I have been learning Scala programming language. This learning is a part of bigger path which I decided to go through to be more familiar with current trends in big data, machine learning and cloud computing.

When I decided to start learning scala the first question coming into my mind was how to start ?

Because I am rather a fun of books, I bought one - “Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects” by Dean Wampler and Alex Payne” and started reading…. but this was not a good idea. The book I have chosen was written in not an easy going style and I think was too hard for the beginning. After few hundreds of pages I felt lost. At the same time on coursera ‘Functional Programming Principles in Scala’ course was reactivated. Not thinking too much I signed in and started participating. After few weeks I earn a certificate of accomplishment but this was not an end of my journey. I started participating in another course “Functional Program Design in Scala” from the same author (Martin Odersky) as the previous one. In parallel I have started reading a book “Programming in Scala Second Edition” by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners and I found it very helpful. Currently (in the time of writing this post) I have done “Parallel programming” course and already enrolled for a “Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark” (still waiting for course publishing)

I think the knowledge I acquired, thanks to those courses and book, is sufficient to start writing and reading programs in scala. Of course it takes some time to be as proficient as in java but I am little closer to this target each day.

Resources

The aim of this section is to gather the valuable resources regarding scala.

Online courses

• Functional Programming Principles in Scala
• Functional Program Design in Scala
• Parallel programming

Books

• Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners
• Scala for the Impatient
• Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects

Cheat sheets

• Scala cheat sheet
• Scala reactive cheat sheet
• Scala cheat sheet from scala-lang.org
• Scala cheat sheet written by me

Tutorials

• Scala By Example
• Scala School
• Tour of scala

Libs

• Scalacheck
• ScalaMeter
• Akka

Other

• scala on stackoverflow

First steps

My recommendation about ordering of going through the resources for beginners:

1. Functional Programming Principles in Scala
2. Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners
3. Functional Program Design in Scala
4. Parallel programming