December 2014
Beginner
256 pages
6h 26m
English
Content preview from Learning ScalaBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Getting Started with the Scalable Language
The Scala programming language has a wonderfully continental ring to its name, as befits its origins at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Scala logo represents a circular stairway, which may lead you to believe its origin is the term La Scala, meaning a staircase or ladder in Italian, or that it derives from the famous Italian opera house Teatro alla Scala. In fact the name Scala is an abbreviation of the term SCAlable LAnguage, a fitting description of its intention. Professor Martin Odersky and his group at EPFL created the language in 2003 to provide a high-performance, concurrent-ready environment for functional programming and object-oriented programming on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) platform.
Now that you have the background story, let’s install Scala and try it out.
Installing Scala
As a JVM language, Scala requires the use of a Java runtime. Scala 2.11, the version you’ll be using, needs at least Java 6. However, I recommend installing the Java 8 JDK (aka Java SE for Standard Environment) instead for optimal performance. You can download the Java 8 JDK (or a later version, if available) for most platforms directly from Oracle’s website. Installers are available, so you shouldn’t need to manually configure your PATH variable to get the applications installed.
When finished, verify your Java version by running java -version from the command line. Here is an example of running ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.