Welcome to Scala for Java Developers: A Practical Primer. This book will help you transition from programming in Java to programming in Scala. It’s designed to help Java developers get started with Scala without necessarily adopting all of the more advanced functional programming idioms.

Scala is both an object-oriented language and a functional language and, although I do talk about some of the advantages of functional programming, this book is more about being productive with imperative Scala than getting to grips with functional programming. If you’re already familiar with Scala but are looking to make the leap to pure functional programming, this probably isn’t the book for you. Check out the excellent Functional Programming in Scala ¹ by Paul Chiusano and Rúnar Bjarnason instead.

The book often compares “like-for-like” between Java and Scala. So, if you’re familiar with doing something a particular way in Java, I’ll show how you might do the same thing in Scala. Along the way, I’ll introduce the Scala language syntax.