Programming in Scala #5, Lift Book #8, Beginning Scala #9

[TylerWeir]

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=54862

Quote:
Here are the top 10 selling books at the JavaOne Bookstore. Are these
a trend? You decide.

1. JavaFX: Building Rich Internet Applications - Addison Wesley ISBN:
013701287X
2. Essential JavaFX - PTR (out June 11, 2009) ISBN: 0137042795
3. Effective Java 2nd ed. - PTR ISBN: 0321356683
4. Java Puzzlers - Addison Wesley ISBN: 032133678X
5. Programming in Scala - Artima ISBN: 0981531601
6. Java Concurrency in Practice - Addison Wesley ISBN:0321349601
7. Beginning Java EE 5: From Novice to Professional - Apress ISBN:
1590594703
8. The Definitive Guide to Lift - Apress ISBN: 1430224215
9. Beginning Scala - Apress ISBN: 1430219890
10. OpenSolaris Bible - Wiley ISBN: 0470385480

Another chance for me to thank everyone involved.
- dpp for building the framework and being more helpful than any
person should be expected to be.
- Derek and Marius for being excellent co-authors and about 8 times
smarter than me.

Huzza!

[Peter Bliznak]

As an loyalist to the cause I already have 3 of them . (yes = 2*scala + lift)

Now for " The Definitive Guide to Lift" - where is numerously mentioned "Appendix A..G ......"
I could not find it anywhere.

P.

---

From: TylerWeir <tyler...@gmail.com>
To: Lift <lif...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2009 10:34:13 AM
Subject: [Lift] Programming in Scala #5, Lift Book #8, Beginning Scala #9

[Derek Chen-Becker]

That's awesome :). Can't wait to get my hands on my copy of Beginning Scala. I have a feeling that we're going to really be ramping up list membership in the next few months.

Derek

[TylerWeir]

Hey Pete, you can grab the appendices online:
http://apress.com/book/view/1430224215

Bottom left of the page.

On Jun 8, 10:49 am, Peter Bliznak <bliz...@rogers.com> wrote:
> As an loyalist to the cause I already have 3 of them . (yes = 2*scala + lift)

>
> Now for " The Definitive Guide to Lift" - where is numerously mentioned "Appendix A..G ......"
> I could not find it anywhere.
>
> P.
>
> ________________________________

> From: TylerWeir <tyler.w...@gmail.com>

[marius d.]

On the apress site: http://apress.com/book/downloadfile/4390

Apress decided (we agreed) that the appendixes will not be included in
the first printing run in order to get the book ready for Java One.

Br's,
Marius

On Jun 8, 5:49 pm, Peter Bliznak <bliz...@rogers.com> wrote:
> As an loyalist to the cause I already have 3 of them . (yes = 2*scala + lift)

>
> Now for " The Definitive Guide to Lift" - where is numerously mentioned "Appendix A..G ......"
> I could not find it anywhere.
>
> P.
>
> ________________________________

> From: TylerWeir <tyler.w...@gmail.com>

[Derek Chen-Becker]

APress was supposed to have a page in the book explaining this, so I apologize for the continuing confusion on this. The print version ran into some limitation with APress' printing workflow due to its size, so they had to cut the appendices from the print version (the eBook version should have the full book content). The appendices are available for free to anyone here:

http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4390

Derek

[Peter Bliznak]

Excellent!
Just curious - publisher forgot to include it in the print? That would be quite a no no .

---

From: TylerWeir <tyler...@gmail.com>
To: Lift <lif...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2009 10:59:15 AM
Subject: [Lift] Re: Programming in Scala #5, Lift Book #8, Beginning Scala #9

[Viktor Klang]

Congrats guys!

You've really deserved it! :)

--
Viktor Klang
Rockstar Developer

[David Pollak]

A big congratulations to the authors as well as the whole Scala community... Yet another proof point that 2009 is the year of Scala.  Rock On!

--
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Git some: http://github.com/dpp

[Derek Chen-Becker]

No, the book ended up being much larger than they anticipated and if I understand it correctly, their workflow process could not handle that many chapters/sections. We had two options: wait for APress to fix the workflow and miss having the book out for JavaOne, or make the appendices available as a free PDF online and have a book ready in June. We opted for the latter, since we felt there was already a lot of interest around Lift and we wanted to have something for people to get their hands on. It's not an ideal situation, and I'm sure some people will disagree with our decision, but it is what it is at this point.

Derek

[Viktor Klang]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Luc Duponcheel <luc.dup...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

 

I attended the talk on Scala and the talk on Lift.

Both excellent talks!

 

[ I did not attend the talk on Actors

(I was cycling on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge (Mt Tamalpais)) ]

 

...

 

Those talks act as 'teasers' to make developers

'eager to know more about Scala'.

 

This is great!

 

But, sometimes, I also have the impression that those talks

'preach for those that are already converted'.

 

The point I want to make is the following:

 

when talking to developers about Scala,

I am almost always confronted with the fact that they

still think it has a 'steep learning curve'.

I tell them that 'once you have climbed the mountain,

you can enjoy the view over the landscape' (cfr Mt Tamalpais).

 

So, I really think there is this need for hands on training.

 

Maybe some of you folks should try to convince Sun (or Oracle) Education

to invest in training courses. Not a simple task indeed, but, worth the effort

(helps Scala becoming mainstream).

 

ps: I agree that I'm partially saying this out of pure opportunism

(I'm delivering Java courses for Sun Education, and, of course,

I would be the first one to deliver Scala courses).

Awesome idea.

Would be great to establish some kind of curriculum with joint teaching material to be able to offer courses worldwide.
 

 

 

Luc

Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Git some: http://github.com/dpp

--
  __~O
 -\ <,
(*)/ (*)

reality goes far beyond imagination

[Heiko Seeberger]

2009/6/9 Viktor Klang <viktor...@gmail.com>

Awesome idea.

Would be great to establish some kind of curriculum with joint teaching material to be able to offer courses worldwide.

+1

We have been doing something similar with Eclipse => www.eclipse-training.net

And very recently we also started with courses on Scala and Lift, still flagged Eclipse Training Alliance. But we would like to go for some kind of world wide Scala Training network. What do you guys think? Interested?

Heiko

[Viktor Klang]

Very!
 

Heiko

[David Pollak]

Luc,

Jorge, Kaliya and I did a LiftWorkshop in November.  We had 6 people at the workshop.  We tried to pack in Scala and Lift all into a day... it didn't work.

Jorge and I have done some review and we figure there's 3 days of Scala training and 2-3 days of Lift training that would be a minimum for folks to be able to go home and build Lift apps.  The To Do example (see http://liftweb.net/docs/getting_started.html ) would be one of the days (we gave it about an hour during the workshop and that was not nearly enough.)

Thanks,

David

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 1:23 AM, Luc Duponcheel <luc.dup...@gmail.com> wrote:

here are some thoughts:

 

 - agreeing upon the what is probably easier than agreeing upon the how

   for example: which IDE to use (if any) during the labs [ Eclipse, Netbeans, ... ] .

   My experience is that the description of how to do labs should be independent

   of any tools (it does not make sense to explicitely state things like: in Netbeans

   go to this submenu and select that choice and ... ).

 

 - I think we should go for 'extreme course development' in the sense that

   changes can be incorporated quickly (any text based format that

   can (in a moderated way) be edited by many people is good

   (e.g. LaTeX, assuming the existence of templates))

   [ maybe git would be a perfect candidate for doing version management ]

   Another advantage of using text based development is that consistency

   can be automated: for example, code excerpts in slides can be extracted

   programmatically from the code proper so that all changes to that code

   are automatically propagated [ and also propagated in the embedded slides

   of student guides ]. I have some LateX templates (and Scala code) to automate all this.

   [ I have to agree that there is much room for improvement of the look-and-feel

    (it has been some time since I played around with LaTeX, and I'm not a specialist

      of LaTeX's beamer package) ]

 

- About the financial model: if it is joint work, then I do not think it makes

  much sense to ask companies like Sun (or Oracle) money for the development

  of the material. If they are willing to make the material part of their curriculum

  (which implies: visibility via their catalogs),

  then we can make money by delivering the material. 

  Whether or not the material itself should be freely downoadable by anyone

  in the world is yet another matter. Again, maybe there should be some

  moderated group of people having access to the material.

 

...

 

Luc

 

 

Luc

--
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net

Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Git some: http://github.com/dpp

--
  __~O
 -\ <,
(*)/ (*)

reality goes far beyond imagination

--
Viktor Klang
Rockstar Developer

--
  __~O
 -\ <,
(*)/ (*)

reality goes far beyond imagination

--

Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net

[Jorge Ortiz]

In addition to the Lift Workshop, I also co-taught a ten-week (1.5hrs/wk) course at Stanford on Scala. It was targeted at advanced undergrads and graduate students. Most were programming language enthusiasts, so the course focused more on the interesting parts of Scala from a programming language perspective, rather than a more practical here's-how-you-get-stuff-done course (like the Lift Workshop).

--j

[Alexy Khrabrov]

Since the topic seems to have morphed into learning Scala and Lift by
immersion in a day, as a recent Scala convert, I can't begin to
emphasize how important it is to have the build infrastructure all
done in a simple way to let novices focus on Scala. Lift is a good
example where you have no choice and just follow magic Maven
incantations. Another is Processing in Scala, where you can just do
small sketches. If the assumption is that it is the Java crowd which
comes to JVM mostly, it doesn't bootstrap non-JVM folks like those
coming from Ruby and Haskell/OCaml. So I'm glad David covers the
build systems in his book; there should really be an easier way to
begin without making choices between Maven, SBT, Buildr, Ant, etc.!
Nothing more complex than a good old command line and a Makefile in
the same directory... Ideally SBT becomes a part of Scala and you'll
have a --make option, or something like that.

Cheers,
Alexy

[Josh Suereth]

I must say, I have not met a build system (besides automake) that
exceeded make in complexity. The amount of funny exceptions to rules
is astounding. I had far less trouble learning maven (in all its
complexity)

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 9, 2009, at 4:56 PM, Alexy Khrabrov <deliv...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Charles F. Munat]

2nd edition?

Derek Chen-Becker wrote:
> No, the book ended up being much larger than they anticipated and if I
> understand it correctly, their workflow process could not handle that
> many chapters/sections. We had two options: wait for APress to fix the
> workflow and miss having the book out for JavaOne, or make the
> appendices available as a free PDF online and have a book ready in June.
> We opted for the latter, since we felt there was already a lot of
> interest around Lift and we wanted to have something for people to get
> their hands on. It's not an ideal situation, and I'm sure some people
> will disagree with our decision, but it is what it is at this point.
>
> Derek
>
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Peter Bliznak <bli...@rogers.com
> <mailto:bli...@rogers.com>> wrote:
>
> Excellent!
> Just curious - publisher forgot to include it in the print? That

> would be quite a no no .
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* TylerWeir <tyler...@gmail.com <mailto:tyler...@gmail.com>>
>
> *To:* Lift <lif...@googlegroups.com <mailto:lif...@googlegroups.com>>
> *Sent:* Monday, June 8, 2009 10:59:15 AM
> *Subject:* [Lift] Re: Programming in Scala #5, Lift Book #8,

> Beginning Scala #9
>
>
> Hey Pete, you can grab the appendices online:
> http://apress.com/book/view/1430224215
>
> Bottom left of the page.
>
> On Jun 8, 10:49 am, Peter Bliznak <bliz...@rogers.com

> <mailto:bliz...@rogers.com>> wrote:
> > As an loyalist to the cause I already have 3 of them . (yes =
> 2*scala + lift)
> >
> > Now for " The Definitive Guide to Lift" - where is numerously
> mentioned "Appendix A..G ......"
> > I could not find it anywhere.
> >
> > P.
> >
> > ________________________________

> > From: TylerWeir <tyler.w...@gmail.com <mailto:tyler.w...@gmail.com>>
> > To: Lift <lif...@googlegroups.com <mailto:lif...@googlegroups.com>>

[Kevin Wright]

Note sure I'd agree make is all that simple... Unless you're doing something VERY basic then it's loaded with potential for accidental complexity.  The whole philosophy of maven is to do the Right Thing(tm) by default, although I must admit that boilerplate for configuring plugins is frequently a pain in the proverbial

[Derek Chen-Becker]

We'd love to do a second edition down the road. Lift is still evolving very quickly, so I have no doubt that there will be lots of new info to cover.

Derek

[TylerWeir]

I have a feeling that we'll have to do a 2nd edition.

On Jun 10, 9:26 am, Derek Chen-Becker <dchenbec...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We'd love to do a second edition down the road. Lift is still evolving very
> quickly, so I have no doubt that there will be lots of new info to cover.
>
> Derek
>

> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:41 AM, Charles F. Munat <c...@munat.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > 2nd edition?
>
> > Derek Chen-Becker wrote:
> > > No, the book ended up being much larger than they anticipated and if I
> > > understand it correctly, their workflow process could not handle that
> > > many chapters/sections. We had two options: wait for APress to fix the
> > > workflow and miss having the book out for JavaOne, or make the
> > > appendices available as a free PDF online and have a book ready in June.
> > > We opted for the latter, since we felt there was already a lot of
> > > interest around Lift and we wanted to have something for people to get
> > > their hands on. It's not an ideal situation, and I'm sure some people
> > > will disagree with our decision, but it is what it is at this point.
>
> > > Derek
>

> > > On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Peter Bliznak <bliz...@rogers.com
> > > <mailto:bliz...@rogers.com>> wrote:
>
> > >     Excellent!
> > >     Just curious - publisher forgot to include it in the print? That
> > >     would be quite a no no .
>
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------

> > >     *From:* TylerWeir <tyler.w...@gmail.com <mailto:tyler.w...@gmail.com