Best way to learn Lift

[Mike Pence]

Hey guys,

Color me another Lift enthusiast from Rails-land. I am wondering if
anyone who has been through the learning journey has a recommendation
of how to go about it. I got the Artima book on Scala, and I am loving
it, but it is a hefty tomb. I don't want to make the mistake I made
when learning Rails of not learning the foundation language first, but
I am eager to get my hands on some Lift.

Advice?

Best,
Mike Pence

[Kris Nuttycombe]

I've actually found that building a Lift project is a fairly effective means of learning Scala, because Lift tends to use a lot of idiomatic Scala that you don't necessarily see in context when reading the Artima book. It can be a lot to take on at once, but I've found that being exposed to and forced to use some of the more unfamiliar language elements (coming from a C/Java/Ruby background) has accelerated my uptake of those features. Particularly when things haven't worked quite as expected and I've had to go digging in the code to figure out what was going on. :)

Kris

[Derek Chen-Becker]

There are also at least two Lift books in the works. You can see the book that Tyler and I are working on here:

http://github.com/tjweir/liftbook/tree/master

If you want to view the actual book you'll need LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

Derek

[Mike Pence]

Awesome! I will check the book out and start putting together a Lift
project soon!

[Erick Fleming]

I second Kris's suggestion.  I'm new to Lift and Scala, but know Java.  If first started converting a Wicket application to Scala.  It's pretty easy to write a Java applications using Scala, but you really don't learn anything about Scala real capabilities.

So, after deciding to write my application in Lift instead, my brain explodes a little every coding day.

My typical process is to try something in Lift, fail because I don't understand it, study the Lift source code a bit (which is actually pretty short in most cases), and match what I see to the Scala Book.

Then I ask on this list and get an answer in a day if not minutes.  I would have given up long ago if not for the mail list.

[David Pollak]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Erick Fleming <eflem...@gmail.com> wrote:

I second Kris's suggestion.  I'm new to Lift and Scala, but know Java.  If first started converting a Wicket application to Scala.  It's pretty easy to write a Java applications using Scala, but you really don't learn anything about Scala real capabilities.

So, after deciding to write my application in Lift instead, my brain explodes a little every coding day.

Please send me your address and I'll send some Windex to clean up the brain bits. :-)
 

My typical process is to try something in Lift, fail because I don't understand it, study the Lift source code a bit (which is actually pretty short in most cases), and match what I see to the Scala Book.

Then I ask on this list and get an answer in a day if not minutes.  I would have given up long ago if not for the mail list.

I'm very glad to hear this.  One of my top-level goals for Lift is to build a great community.  I'm really glad that there are lots of people on the list who are helpful and responsive to newbies and JPA code sloggers alike.

Something to give thanks for.


 

--
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Collaborative Task Management http://much4.us
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Git some: http://github.com/dpp

[Matt Harrington]

You don't need to read the entire stairway book to start being
productive with Lift. Try chapters 1-17, 24, and 30.

After that, I'd ...

- Read http://liftweb.net/index.php/Maven_Mini_Guide
- install Maven from http://maven.apache.org
- Set up NetBeans with Maven and the Scala plugin.
- Try this: http://liftweb.net/index.php/HowTo_start_a_new_liftwebapp
- Familiarize yourself with all files in lift-archetype-basic
- Start looking at the Scaladocs: http://tinyurl.com/6g75fa
- Understand this:
http://liftweb.net/index.php/How_lift_processes_HTTP_requests
- Understand SiteMap: http://liftweb.net/index.php/SiteMap

That's as far as I've gotten myself.

---Matt