Announcing Beginning Scala

You may be asking, "Why is David, the Lift guy, writing a Scala book?"

First... let's talk about APress.

I've been a long-time fan of APress.  It's a great tech publishing house.  Gary Cornell founded APress after a less than optimal experience with other publishers.  He fashioned APress into an author's publisher and has attracked and published some pretty amazing talent and great books over the years.

Despite that Gary is no longer at APress day-to-day, his legacy and vision lives on.  When Steve Anglin approached me to write a Lift book, I was initially hesitant.  I've had sub-optimal writing experiences in the past.  I've talked to most of the tech publishers about a Lift book.  But, Steve went a couple of extra miles in the process.  He found a co-author (which it turns out I didn't need.)  He spent time discussing the book market with me.  He convinced me that Gary's vision was still alive and well at APress.  APress had the environment that I wanted to work in.

Steve worked with me to put together an outline and a proposal for a Lift book.  However, the publishers thought that the market is not yet ripe for a Lift book.  So, Steve proposed that I do a Scala book.  Once again, Steve worked with me to put together an outline and proposal.  The Scala proposal was accepted (woo hoo!)

I started work in mid-December for a January 5th deadline for the first three chapters.  I slipped the deadline by a week or so (writing during the holidays, especially when our nanny was out on maternity leave, is something of a challenge.)

The book will be 9 chapters and it will mostly cover Scala basics.  I'm focusing a lot on the joys of immutability and how the mind-shift to immutability, function passing, and small blocks of code can make composing large scale and defect-reduced programs super-simple.

The book will not be "open source."  It may be available as an early access PDF from APress's site.  We're targetting a publication date at JavaOne.  Maybe APress will even throw a party at JavaOne.