Customer Reviews

Beginning Scala (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Frankly I am puzzled by the glowing reviews of this book. While I have found it helpful for getting started on a few points, the elements that threw me off track or had me reaching for other resources made getting through the volume difficult.

On the whole, the book feels to me as if it had been rather casually assembled from a series of notes or perhaps blog entry passages. While I understand the book is posed as an interactive, exploratory guide, there are several cases where an example using an unfamiliar language element is explained several pages later as if being introduced for the first time. There are other cases where a concept is explained several times as if starting over, which makes the "tour" seem ill-organized.

The first major code example is a huge leap from the starter lines. It introduces at once not only several major concepts, but also a few economies of expression that are made possible in Scala. It was so much stuff all in one place, and very early on, that I wasn't at all sure what to focus on. I spent a great deal of my time, after reading through once, trying to piece together what there was to learn from this guide. I have also far more questions about the language and its use than I started with -- a good thing in many respects -- but many of my questions start with whether I've understood a given point correctly.

Like the author, I lack any formal training in functional programming, so my knowledge gap may be wider than the average interested reader. As a teacher myself, however, I am convinced that a beginning guide can and should be systematic without sacrificing an interactive style. Key concepts should have some introductory text before applying several of them in one go in a dense piece of code. I certainly don't doubt the author's abilities and desire to inform others well, but I had to work a lot harder than I expected to get what I wanted from this guide.

Everything that "Beginning Scala"' sets out to do, it does well. Still need to be convinced that Scala is relevant to your programming future? Chapter 1 makes the most convincing case of it that I have seen, leveraging not just the author's knowledge of this relatively new language but his substantial and diverse experience in software, developing for more platforms and within more paradigms than most of us have heard of. This experience is evident throughout, with examples that range from the whimsical (yet instructive) to the eerily familiar. The title of Chapter 4 will ring a few bells for anyone who has programmed in Java professionally: "Fun with Functions, and Never Having to Close That JDBC Connection". (Scala, where were you in 2002?)

Just as important as the information contained is how it's presented. "Beginning Scala" strikes a balance between conversational and serious that makes it particularly approachable to beginners and, I would wager, disarming to Scala skeptics. The editors should be commended for taking a chance and allowing a tone that, for many technical authors that attempt it, can come off as cheeky. But in this book Pollak's voice adds a convincing dash of passion to the work that (as much as is possible in programming literature!) makes it a page-turner.

To learn Scala, there's a hard way and an easy way. This is the easy way.

(Adapted from a similar blog article I wrote, at [...])

I picked up a copy of Beginning Scala a week ago, and I'm finding it to be a useful complement to Programming in Scala. I find, when I'm learning a new language, that different approaches fire different synapses. Programming in Scala (sometimes called "the staircase book", for its front cover) is an in-depth book that covers Scala in great detail. It is, in every way, the K & R of Scala. I have a copy of Programming in Scala; I've read it, and I continue to refer to it and re-read parts of it.

Now that I'm about halfway through Beginning Scala, I'm finding that it's pointing out some new tricks, tricks I missed in the staircase book and on the mailing lists. I'm certain I could find these tricks find by poring back over the staircase book, but Pollak's clear, concise and highly practical approach makes them readily apparent and easy to grasp.

I've been using Scala for several months now, and it's not the first programming language I've taught myself (not by a long shot). It is a complex and powerful language, and I cannot learn all its tricks from one book, or even from reading alone. I'll be learning it and refining my use of it for awhile yet. Alternate viewpoints help, and although Beginning Scala is ostensibly targeted at Scala beginners, it assumes the reader is not a programming beginner or an idiot. It's written in a concise, practical style that contrasts nicely with the style of Programming in Scala. The different approaches the two books take hammer home many of the concepts of Scala in a way that either book, by itself, does not.

Neither book has made it to my bookshelf yet, because I keep referring to both of them. For me, that's proof enough of their value. If you're just learning Scala, or if you've been using it for awhile, you'll likely find great value in Beginning Scala.

I've only made it through chapter two, and I am already moved to come onto the Internet and warn others about this terrible, confusing book.

I am new to Scala and new to functional programming, and since we're trialing Scala at work I thought 'Beginning Scala' would be an appropriate place to start. A quick flick through at the book store promised I would 'explore the power, simplicity and beauty' of the language 'in a fun, interactive way'. Sold!

Whilst Pollak's writing style does seem a little rushed, my main problem is with the ludicrously flawed code examples. To illustrate the unfamiliar concept of 'traits', you'd expect the author to reach for well-trodden, real world examples. But no! Apparently it is more 'fun' and 'interactive' to throw together a random bag of unrelated nonsense words and use those instead:

class Yep extends FuzzyCat with OtherThing

What's wrong, can't you picture a yep? You know, it's like a kind of fuzzy cat, but with an... other thing? The examples don't get any clearer as we move on to overriding methods:

object Dude2 extends Yep {
override def meow() = "Dude looks like a cat"
}

Ah, the distinctive meow of a Dude2.

Added to this, the book doesn't seem to know its audience. Elementary concepts such as variable scoping are illustrated amongst swathes of unrelated (and unexplained) Scala syntax, rendering the explanation useless to both new and experienced programmers.

Maybe it gets better further in (and I will try to keep reading), but to a Java programmer already somewhat skeptical of Scala's merits this book is more of a barrier than an aide to further Scala exploration. There must be something better out there.

A better title would be "A Scala taster for the Java Programmer" (something you equally get from the Scala web site); very definitely not a "Scala as my first language" text. One of these days we might get a Scala text that doesn't presume any Java experience, but this is not that book.

A besetting sin across the Apress line (Foundations of F# (Expert's Voice in .Net) and Expert F# (Expert's Voice in .Net) also suffer from the similar problem), is weak editing. The author gushes with enthusiasm, and almost free-associates at you, leaving the reader to reverse engineer the general principles being talked around from the accidents of the particular example, without firm editorial hand to separate them.

The editorial hand is also weak, not only in the usual '"Sever" where "Server" was intended' level of copy-editing; but in missing the inconsistent explanation of the use of colon (:) to bind operators right-to-left (page 53 vs page 128 -- I believe the latter is correct).

There are a few features of the language that this book touches on, incidentally and in passing (synchronized methods, duck-type constraints of the [A <: def ...signature...] form), that are not covered in the Stairway Book (Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-step Guide), and the different set of examples provide a separate perspective on the practical application of the language features, but I am not sure to what reader, beside the completist, I would recommend this book.

I must admit I'm only up to chapter 3. However I've already caught about 10 type-os... word errors...etc. I feel like I'm reading a useful blog -- not a book that has been through the editing process. Things like:

"there's no reason way to use mixins".... Obviously the spell checker let that one through .. but why did a human?

"As a side note, you may worry about performance. The Scala compiler optimizes operations on JVM primitives such that the performance of the Scala code is nearly identical to the performance of the Java code."

Should I worry? or should I not worry? I don't think so.. but....

I'd be really peaved.... but I've read the other Scala book (Programming in Scala) and it wasn't as accessible as this book. I've found several times already where I've read this book explain a topic and it *clicked* where-as with the other book I understood what was being said -- but not why it was useful.

I'll edit this review once I finish up the book. Right now with the Derth of scala books out there --- I'd recommend this to people -- but only people who won't get hung up on the mistakes.

**UPDATE**
Okay I've finished it up. The word-smithing was much better in later chapters. It must have been something about chapter 2.. or maybe it was just me! I'd up this to 4 stars. The book is very accessible to Scala noobs -- and made good use of the readers previous java knowledge. A few times it felt like it was repeating itself -- but I think that is good thing because it wasn't overdone.. it was more like an instructor dropping an import concept across several lectures to make sure it sunk in.

The book is not written in a systematic manner and goes all over the various topic leading to confusion for beginners like me. I will definitely not recommend it to beginners.

Having had some exposure to Java, I was hopeful to pick up a beginner's level text. The title turned out to be a misnomer in that respect.

If you are like me, you are often hard pressed for getting many things done quickly.

If you want a quick introduction to Scala, this book is just right for the level of information provided to get you up and running quickly.

I enjoyed reading David Pollak's "Beginning Scala" - and found it to be very helpful in several ways:

#1 - It is written from the perspective of an experienced Java programmer - and the parallels between the languages that are cited in the text was a very helpful technique for compressing the time needed to digest the material. Ruby parallels are also frequently covered.

#2 - This book is a great book to have on your bookshelf if you want to become immediately productive. David's writing is direct, practical, pragmatic.

#3 - This book is useful for the application developer, library designer, and architect.

At ~290 pages - Beginning Scala does a good solid job of covering the language, with many interesting examples of Scala code.

Chapters include:
1 - About Scala and How to Install It
2 - Scala Syntax, Scripts, and Your First Scala Programs
3 - Collections and the Joy of Immutability
4 - Fun with Functions, and Never Having to Close that JDBC Connection
5 - Pattern Matching
6 - Actors and Concurrency
7 - Traits and Types and Gnarly Stuff for Architects
8 - Parsers - Because BNF Is Not Just for Academics Anymore
9 - Scaling Your Team

I had the pleasure of meeting David at JavaOne 2009 in San Francisco this year. He is a genuinely nice guy - and a passionate Scala enthusiast.

This book is nice and short. It dives into the things Scala has to offer pretty quickly. It makes a good complement to Programming Scala.

The book has lots of little examples and comes from someone who's been using Scala for commercial work for the last couple years.

Finally, the chapter on parsing is simply excellent.