Dissimilar Scala book in near future

Question

I've seen quite a few books about Scala, but those are so similar to each other. Wonder what titles (related to Scala) would you like to see that would differ from "main stream"?

Answer 1

At this point, all Scala books are about teaching Scala. That's natural, as most readers won't be familiar with Scala.

As time passes, we'll likely need books with Scala Patterns (which can be very different from Java patterns) and anti-Patterns, coding tips, advanced algorithms, or topic-specific, like concurrency or strategic programming.

The Lift book kind of fits in the category of topic-specific, but it is really much more about the Lift library and Lift usage than about general Scala usage for web programming.

Answer 2

One important thing we don't yet have is an entry-level book, suitable for Scala as a first language, rather than as a next step after Java, assuming some familiarity with the JVM APIs and the syntax of Java.

At the moment there is not a text on the language that I could really recommend to a bright youngster (late teens) who wants to start programming with something better than the Hobson's choice of Pascal available in the IT classes at school -- not that any of the other (quasi-)functional languages are in much better state.

Answer 3

Another topic-specific book on the way is "actors in scala" - which was mentioned at the Scala BASE meetup - currently being authored (or co-authored at least) by Martin Odersky.

The actors framework offers a substantially new concurrency model (pioneered in Erlang) that aims to make writing concurrent code easier than traditional shared state concurrency, as well as offering better scalability for multi-core architectures.