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Daniel Westheide
danielwestheide.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Daniel Westheide writes about Scala, including the multi-part Neophyte's Guide to Scala, and about web API design and software complexity.
What HN saysHN commenters repeatedly recommend the Neophyte's Guide as a top resource for learning Scala, calling it the best language introduction one commenter has read.
19HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
12stories submitted
242story points
5 years agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Neophyte's Guide to Scala7 people · 105 points · first shared 2013 · 8 comments on HN
- 2The Empathic Programmer4 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap2 people · 122 points · first shared 2018 · 44 comments on HN
- 4The Neophyte’s Guide to Scala Part 1: Extractors2 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 5The Neophyte's Guide to Scala: Welcome to the Future1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 6The Neophyte's Guide to Scala Part 13: Path-Dependent Types1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7Playing Nice – Designing and Implementing Well-Behaved Web APIs (slides)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The neophytes guide to scala1 people · first shared 2021
- 9Homepage1 people · first shared 2013
What HN people wrote when they linked it
pvillega · 2013-03-25
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-guide-to-scal… 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
ssmoot · 2014-10-07
I second "Scala for the Impatient", but if you don't have any statically typed background it might be a bit tough.
"The Neophyte's Guide to Scala" (http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html) is hands down the best language introduction I've ever read though.
hocuspocus · 2021-05-14
In no particular order:
- If you're at least a little familiar with Java, Scala for the Impatient is pretty good, though a little dated (I think the last edition covers Scala 2.12).
- Daniel Westheide's blog: https://danielwestheide.com/books/the-neophytes-guide-to-scala/
- https://www.scala-exercises.org (at least the part on the standard library).
- https://www.handsonscala.com
Note: Scala 3 introduces quite a bit of new syntax that is specifically designed to make intimidating features less so. But at the beginner/intermediate level it won't matter too much, for instance if you learn how to implement typeclasses the old way, you'll easily understand the new syntax. Also the Scala Center has committed to providing a lot of training material along with the Scala 3 release.
rollulus · 2017-03-27
I started with Scala a year ago for work. I used a mixture of the resources listed here, but I found this [1] series the most valuable, after the other resources gave a basic foundation.
[1]: http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html
gh0zt · 2017-03-27
As you are asking for books
- Scala for the impatient (http://www.horstmann.com/scala/)
- Programming in Scala (https://booksites.artima.com/programming_in_scala_3ed)
I found those books very good resources. The Scala website lists a few others (https://www.scala-lang.org/documentation/books.html)
Aprt from that I found Daniel Westheides blog a very good starting point (http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html)
karavelov · 2013-08-19
I am learning Scala last couple of months. Twitter scala page is really nice for starting up. Another place with discussion of more advanced topics I find useful:
http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html
wtf_is_up · 2015-05-16
Agreed. I'm using IntelliJ Community Edition with Scala plugin. It works really well. Only settings I've changed were setting the font to Source Code Pro and turning off spell checking.
I'm absolutely loving Scala right now. I was writing a lot of stuff in Go until I started a new project that needed to leverage some Java libs. I had been wanting to try Scala, so I went with it instead of Java (or Clojure, etc).
I liked Go for it's elegant concurrency, ease of deployment, and fast compiler, but Scala's type system and composition with for comprehensions is really nice.
Java interop is pretty seamless so far. Scala has nice primitives for wrapping null and exceptions in safer ways and eliminates a lot of ugly x != null checks everywhere.
Coming into it, I'd heard that Scala was hard to learn, but I didn't find that to be true. I was only vaguely familiar with pattern matching, monads, traits, ADTs, etc from playing with Rust, but I found plenty of good resources for learning Scala.
I really found this series of blog posts to be helpful: http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html