[MaysonL]

Coursera has a couple of Scala courses: try the introductory one "Functional Programming Principles in Scala". I'm not sure when it will be offered next, but they've given it a few times already. It doesn't require any Java knowledge.

[bkeroack]

Thanks for the suggestion, I looked through that Coursera course. I'm reasonably comfortable with the language fundamentals, it's more about the toolchain and using third-party libraries like the Slick ORM. I find the quickstart inscrutable (maybe it's just me).

As a counter example, I was up and running with Go in 15 minutes.

[zenbowman]

Slick in my experience is pretty unusable even for experienced Scalaphiles. I couldn't use it until I wrote a wrapper for it:

https://github.com/zenbowman/slickint

And even then, I think I by far prefer raw SQL to Slick. If you stick to the standard Scala libraries, they are pretty well designed, and I second taking the Functional progamming in scala course. There is some discussion of the toolchain in Lecture 0 of that course.

[bkeroack]

Interesting, thank you. Do you have any ORMs that you recommend above Slick? I think raw SQL is probably a deal-breaker for us.

[zenbowman]

Nope, Slick is the best one that I ran across for Scala.

I just found writing the classes painful so I wrote slickint to deal with generation of classes, and it was reasonable after that.