Company blog of Typesafe, the firm behind Scala, Akka and Play, covering releases, funding news and technical guidance.
HN links it for Scala announcements such as the Series B and Play 2.0, and commenters call Scala for the Impatient the best Scala introduction.
I don't think this is a good guide for Learning Scala.
The Introduction from scala-lang.org and a Tour of Scala are not good introductions. They are meant as a TL;DR that will leave you scratching your head and reading the list of features without the larger context of a language is an awful way to learn about that language.
IntelliJ IDEA with the Scala plugin is a good IDE, but the article should have included a link to the Scala-IDE plugin for Eclipse. It's not friendly for beginners to make them install a plugin, which is why Typesafe is already providing a download of a completely configured
Eclipse here: http://typesafe.com/stack/scala_ide_download
Also, when starting out with a language I would rather use a plain text editor and the compiler directly, because complicated tools bring with them complicated problems ... Hello World with just the compiler is just one text file that you can directly execute, versus the notion of whatever a project is in an IDE. And you should start with the REPL anyway.
"Scala for Java Refugees" is an article series that's out of date and not that good frankly. There already is a comment here from somebody saying he was scared when he saw in that series the usage of implicit conversions - a feature that in Scala 2.10 is considered experimental, for really advanced use-cases and that has to be enabled manually, as for most purposes there are better solutions available - but on the other hand, the context of a feature matters a lot.…
I'd argue that Play will circumvent this "hipster phase" issue for (at least) these three reasons:
(1) The ubiquity of the Java/JVM ecosystem paired with the interest in a alternative to Java will keep the functional JVM Langauges like Scala/Clojure in high demand.
(2) The Typesafe machine pushing Play (see http://blog.typesafe.com/typesafe-announces-14m-series-b-financing).
(3) Scala is your best bet for a Statically Typed Functional JVM language. Also, we use Play 2.0 at the startup I develop for.
I also find that Play is pretty cool to work with. Gone are the days of having to use servlet containers for development.
A recent Typesafe blog post was written in response to the last Scala-complaint furor: http://blog.typesafe.com/getting-down-to-work
One of the points mentioned there is binary compatibility. The Typesafe people are working on it, so hopefully we'll see some improvement over the next year or so.
The coverage at GigaOm provides a bit more substance.
http://gigaom.com/cloud/typesafe-gets-14m-to-push-scala-as-a-better-java-than-java/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom
And there's the Typsafe blog from the source:
http://blog.typesafe.com
personal wish: this, with CRUD scaffolding and GAE support, will make Play my dream framework.
edit: this news announcement from Typesafe explains a bit more about Play 2.0: http://blog.typesafe.com/introducing-play-20
Scala for the Impatient is definitely the best introduction to Scala (by a wide margin). Re-posting your link:
http://blog.typesafe.com/free-pdf-from-typesafe-scala-for-the-impatien-64715