Don’t let some chapters put you off learning Scala!

A few months ago, I heard about Scala and wanted to know more. So I started reading “Scala by Example” but only up to chapter 2. I was already confused after the first chapter and the second was just over the top. For me, learning a new language belongs into the category of “learning for fun” and not crunching seemly weird concepts that don’t apply to any of my current challenges. It took me a while to recover and start over again with the introduction published on Artima and I’m still going full steam ahead with Scala…

To save you the delay I experienced, follow this order:

1. If still in doubt that Scala is worth the pain of learning another language, get convinced by the tour.
2. By now, you want to learn the language in a more structured way. You are ready for excellent Artima article “First Steps to Scala“. Don’t start with anything from the Scala homepage!
3. During reading the introduction, your fingers might get nervous. Calm them down with installing Scala.
4. The HelloWorld sample shows you quickly the use of the installed tools.
5. Ok, you can start tackling the tutorials page: Start with the 15-page tutorial.pdf.
6. Installing the eclipse plugin is also a good idea. The Quick Tour “Working with Eclipse and the Scala Plugin” shows you everything. But don’t expect too much from the plugin: It’s currently the worst thing in the Scala ecosystem.
7. Ultimately, download Programming in Scala. This pdf joins the “Scala by Example” and the language specifications, so you have all in one document.
8. And finally, I learned a lot browsing and tweaking the source of lift, a web framework.

After working through all those steps, chapter 1 and 2 become great readings.

Happy learning!

6 Quickies for Flex Builder

1. Press Ctrl and the class or method becomes a hyperlink that brings you with a click to its declaration. The other option is pressing F3.
2. Tab flipping like in Firefox: Window > Preferences > General > Keys > View then in category “Window”, find “Next Editor” and assign Alt+Tab to the command. Don’t forget to really add the key sequence.
3. I have always two Eclipse windows: One for the client in the Flex Perspective and the other for the server in the Java Perspective. You can do this with a right click onto the Java-Project and choosing “Open in new Window”
4. For performance reasons, I had to disable subclipse. Eclipse became very slow recently.
5. For digging libraries, I like to see the type hierarchy: F4 helps.
6. Ctrl+H is the information desk. “Select resources” cuts the time for the search down.
7. [Update] Like in Acrobat Reader or FireFox, you can skip to your last position with Alt+<-
8. [Update] Reading the source of the some Flex components came be very helpful: You get the class browser with Ctrl+Shift+T.
9. [2nd Update] I just learned about Dash that remains me of Greasmonkey. You can write your own little scripts in any Eclipse project. EOkyere shows a useful script for creating getter/setters in ActionScript with only writing var test:String.

And here a quickie for FREE in Firefox

Use Quick Searches! When I want to know how much fat a radish has, I type in Firefox:

• F6: brings me to the URL field
• wp radish
• = it’s 1g per kg

You can do this for the Flex search or any other site that allows to insert the search term in the URL. For Wikipedia,

1. Create a bookmark in the “Quick Searches” folder
2. Open the properties of this bookmark
3. Insert in Location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
4. Insert in Keyword: wp
5. et finito
   

Maybe Google could integrate this feature in a personalized search? So I only have to use one input field for searching.