Hey folks!

I second the PinS recommendation, it's an exceptional book. Make sure to get
the second edition though.

As for meetings, I'm planning to set up another one soon once 2.9 goes
beta.

If anyone else has a topic they'd like to talk about, I'm all ears!  I've
been trying to get Chris Shorrock to tell us about what he's been doing at
EA but maybe it's too secret. :)

Also, I've been toying with the idea of doing a training course, which would
be very cheap for the inaugural sessions, let me know if you're interested,
everyone!

-0xe1a
On 2011-03-08 6:59 PM, "Paul Lambert" <popepalpat...@gmail.com> wrote:

material & tutorials go, "Programming in Scala" really is *the* go to book,
it's fantastic. I almost read it cover to cover in the last two weeks which
is something I've almost never done with a computer book. The second edition
recently came out, so all the 2.8 stuff in there too now:
http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala_2ed
the o'reilly answer to the previous book and is published openly at the
given address. I haven't been through it much myself, so I can't comment on
the quality but I assume it must be alright.
right in, it's close enough. To me scala feels like java++. I surprised my
co-developer at Matygo one morning telling him I started rewriting our java
backend in scala, and he sat down and spent the whole day working on it with
me, fairly effectively, having never written a line of scala before in his
life. Do you have an old project you want to rewrite? A new little one
you've been thinking of trying? Do it. It won't be the best or prettiest
scala ever written, but it'll get the ball rollling. Dive in, iterate and
improve :)
Functional programming conceptually is much simpler than imperative I
find... it's really all about lack of side effects and referential
transparency. for example you know if there's no return value (eg :Unit or
using .foreach) you're dependent on side effects. So always try to return
something. Use maps and folds whenever possible. Use vals. Of course ask
yourself 'why' - no point in being functional just for the sake of it.
Usually there is good reasons, like conciseness, expressiveness, the ease of
reasoning with referential transparency, concurrency, etc... - but if those
don't feel apparent in a particular case don't force it.
meetup.com and there doesn't seem to be a group. I think this list has had
some before, but I don't know I'm new ;)