Scala Cheat Sheet Created

I started teaching myself Scala this week because I want to speed up coding of new projects without sacrificing quality, readability, reliability and performance. Scala seems like a good choice for this. I've also been interested in learning more about functional programming, and exploring the concurrency benefits that functional programming can bring to the table.

I've read halfway through a book on Erlang , another functional programming language, and am finding many similarities to Scala. (That book, BTW, "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World", by Joe Armstrong , is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.)

So far, I'm liking Scala a lot. It's comfortable because of it's close ties to Java and the fact that it runs in the JVM. It's also compatible with much of the Java code I've written in my life, so that's a huge plus!

My only complaint at this point is with the documentation I've found. There's a lot of great online documentation, but the quick start articles I've read thus far seem to skip all over the place and leave a lot out, so I find myself flipping from one to the other trying to make sense of what I'm reading. It would be a lot easier if I had a concise reference to glance at.

I decided that what's needed is a cheat sheet (pdf), but then couldn't find one, and because necessity is the mother of invention, I've written my own.

Now beware, this cheat sheet was created by a newborn 3-day old Scala programmer, so there may be a lot of corrections needed, and I'm certain it needs more information added to it, but I think this is good enough to start with for a quick start guide.

[Update: I've made several improvements and added a version number that I'll increment every time I update it.]

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References for the quick start cheat sheet:

The Busy Developers' Guide to Scala series:

• “Don't Get Thrown for a Loop”, IBM developerWorks
• “Class action”, IBM developerWorks
• “Functional programming for the object oriented”, IBM developerWorks

Scala Reference Manuals:

• “An Overview of the Scala Programming Language” (2. Edition, 20 pages), scala-lang.org
• A Brief Scala Tutorial, scala-lang.org
• “A Tour of Scala”, scala-lang.org

"Scala for Java programmers", A. Sundararajan's Weblog, blogs.sun.com