Table of Contents

Preface

Audience

This book is for Java developers looking to transition to programming in Scala.

About the Author

Toby Weston is an independent software developer based in London. He specialises in Java and Scala development, working in agile environments. He’s a keen blogger and writer, having written for JAXenter and authored the books Essential Acceptance Testing and What’s New in Java 8. A big supporter of open source software, Toby has contributed to several projects including jMock.

The Structure of the Book

The book is split into four parts: a tour of Scala, a comparison between Java and Scala, Scala-specific features and functional programming idioms, and finally a discussion about adopting Scala into existing Java teams.

In the first part, we’re going to take a high-level tour of Scala. You’ll get a feel for the language’s constructs and how Scala is similar in a lot of ways to Java, yet very different in others. We’ll take a look at installing Scala and using the interactive interpreter and we’ll go through some basic syntax examples.

Part II. talks about key differences between Java and Scala. We’ll look at what’s missing in Scala compared to Java and how concepts translate from one language to another.

Then in Part III., we’ll talk about some of the language features that Scala offers that aren’t found in Java. This section also talks a little about functional programming idioms.

Finally, we’ll talk about adopting Scala into legacy Java projects and teams. It’s not always an easy transition, so we’ll look at why you would want to, and some of the challenges you might face.

Credits

Author Toby Weston (http://baddotrobot.com)

Copyeditor Amy Brown (http://www.amyrbrown.ca)