welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Get Programming with Scala, and welcome to the magical world of Scala! I am really excited to share with you the units for this book that I have written so far: I hope you’ll find them useful and that you’ll provide your feedback to make this book even better.

Until recently, Object Oriented Programming (OOP) was considered the style to follow. But with the growing need for handling concurrency and multi-core processing, Functional Programming (FP) is becoming more and more popular. We are in a transition period where developers are familiar with the OOP paradigm, but they would like to learn more about FP. Scala is establishing itself in this niche, as it allows programmers to combine the two approaches.

Scala is a beautiful, powerful language that is extremely pleasant to use, but it has the reputation of being difficult to learn. With Get Programming with Scala, I want to teach you the basics of Scala and Functional Programming. After reading this book, you should be able to write fully working and practical programs in Scala, and you should have the tools to keep exploring the world of Functional Programming in Scala on your own. I am going to assume you have done some programming with an object-oriented language such as Python, Java, or C++. Do not worry if you don’t know any functional programming: you are going to discover how useful it can be while reading this book!