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by pvillega 4830 days ago
To anyone doing the course or interested in Scala, 2 recommendations:

* the blog of Daniel Westheide (http://danielwestheide.com/) has a series of posts (starting at http://danielwestheide.com/blog/2012/11/21/the-neophytes-gui... and currently at lesson 15) which may be worth reading to complement/expand on the course lectures. Probably not useful for the course itself until you’ve finished week 2 or 3, but relevant anyway.

* the book “Scala for the impatient”, probably the best book out there about Scala from beginner to advanced level

1 comments

I'll politely offer some dissenting opinion regarding Scala for the Impatient. I found that it really doesn't live up to its name if you have done any FP before, ever, even in Scheme or Lisp, because Horstmann treats functional programming like a somewhat advanced topic, and doesn't really address it in the first dozen chapters, instead covering file IO, regular expressions, and packages before higher order functions and pattern matching. When he gets to it, FP is covered at an introductory level at first. Instead I think it would have been better titled "Scala for the Impatient Java developer", because it doesn't really get to the meat of what makes Scala different from ML and Haskell very quickly.

Even as a beginner text, I think it's a bit lacking due to hurried presentation. This Coursera class is a far, far better presentation of intro FP, and a much better intro to Scala IMHO.