[NickPollard]

I would definitely recommend Martin's Coursera course, it's incredibly well structured and very well delivered, with enough difficulty to be challenging but it guides you through very gently. Well worth it for learning both Scala and Functional Programming.

[jghn]

In retrospect I found it to be more of a "functional programming which happens to be using scala" class and less an "intro to scala". That's not a bad thing (nor a good thing, it's just a thing) but it's not necessarily what is most useful for a person.

A few years ago I joined a group which had been using scala for a while (since '09ish IIRC) and I took the coursera class to get up to speed. It definitely helped but the reality was that their code base was closer to being java++ than to haskell and a lot of the early habits I picked up from the coursera class were immediately beaten out of me once I got rolling there.

One could argue that they were in the wrong, but I disagree - Scala is a multi-paradigm language and not everyone is going the FP route (I recently heard Venners refer to Scala as a "reform movement for OO, which is how I personally treat it, but that's neither here nor there).

All this said, I don't have a better suggestion. As I mentioned I took the Coursera class and read the Staircase book. The Twitter stuff online was useful but mainly I just read as much as I could online, tracked down conference videos, etc.