My co-author, Alex Payne, and I hit a major milestone today for Programming Scala. After a feverish holiday weekend of writing, we finished all the remaining sections of the book. This morning, we released it to O’Reilly’s crack production team. “If you love something, set it free” or something sappy like that. Of course, the corollary is, “if it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it…”
But I digress. There will be more reviews and final edits. You can still add your comments online using the link above. However, the text is essentially done. It has started the final journey that will turn our words into a book, something of a life-long dream of mine that I waited too long to achieve. Kudo’s to Alex for pursuing this dream early in his career. If it’s a dream you have entertained, know that it’s never too late.
On the other hand, whatever modest qualities the book possesses reflect the combined years of experience that Alex and I have acquired, sometimes painfully. In a way, as I reflect on what I wrote, Programming Scala is a software design book masquerading as a language book. The truly seductive quality of Scala is that it makes elegant design concepts possible, which is why I’ve placed so much faith in the language.
Alex posted his own thoughts on the project, which I hope you’ll take the time to read. I’m grateful for his insights and experience with Scala, the elegance of his prose in the book, and the great work he’s done at Twitter, which caused me to get so addicted to Twitter that I spent too much time tweeting over the last year, which meant I had to work my proverbial butt off this past weekend to get the book done. Thanks a lot!!