Written by Dave Gurnell and Noel Welsh. Copyright Underscore Consulting LLP, 2015--2017.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Creative Scala is a free ebook aimed at developers who have no prior experience in Scala. It is designed to give you a vital first taste of functional programming. We assume you have some familiarity with another programming language but little or no experience with Scala or other functional languages.
This is version 2 of Creative Scala, which is still in development.
See the master
branch for the first version.
Our goal is to demonstrate the building blocks that Scala developers use to create programs in a clear, succinct, declarative manner. Working through the exercises in the book should take two to three hours, after which we hope you will have a feel of what Scala can do for your applications.
The exercises in Creative Scala are based on a functional graphics library called Doodle. Although Doodle is primarily designed to make programming fun and creative, it is based on universal concepts that can be applied to any business application.
Creative Scala uses Underscore's ebook build system.
The simplest way to build the book is to use Docker Compose:
- install Docker Compose (
brew install docker-compose
on OS X; or download from docker.com); and - run
go.sh
(ordocker-compose run book bash
ifgo.sh
doesn't work).
This will open a bash
shell running inside the Docker container which contains all the dependencies to build the book. From the shell run:
npm install
; and thensbt
.
Within sbt
you can issue the commands pdf
, html
, epub
, or all
to build the desired version(s) of the book. Targets are placed in the dist
directory: