Hi,
Greetings from Copenhagen on the eve of Scala Days. In this newsletter I have a few things to talk about… conference talks, training, type tetris, and—oh—making all of our books free and open source.
Books
Let’s cut to the chase. As of about 5 minutes ago we’ve made all our books free and open source. You can get a copy of any of our books right now in PDF, HTML, or ePUB and pay absolutely nothing. You can also head to the repositories and hack on the source if you should so desire.
Why did we do this? We’ve reached orders of magnitude more people with our free books (Creative Scala and The Type Astronaut’s Guide to Shapeless) than we ever could with our paid books, and we’ve decided that the greater reach outweighed the revenue we made. Don’t prove us wrong—go and download some books now! Here’s the complete list of what’s available:
- Creative Scala, an introduction to functional programming and Scala using computer graphics.
- Essential Scala, our guide to programming Scala for professional developers.
- Advanced Scala with Cats, which introduces core functional programming patterns for building large-scale software.
- The Type Astronaut’s Guide to Shapeless, the key to unlocking the power in the Shapeless library.
- Essential Slick, the definitive guide to using the Slick database access library.
- Essential Play, a short, focused guide to getting started with Play.
Scala Days
You’re still here? In that case let’s talk about Scala Days.
I’m writing to you from an AirBnB in Copenhagen. Martin Odersky has just finished his evening keynote and we’re ready to head out to the conference proper tomorrow morning.
We have a few talks in the works. I am giving two talks on Friday and an Ignite session tomorrow night. Dave is talking about macros and shapeless… it’s all go.
This year’s Scala Days is about more than conference talks, however. My conference started yesterday with ScalaBridge and continued with the Open Source Spree today. We managed to get lots done on Doodle and Creative Scala… watch for new updates coming soon. Miles and Dave will be at the Type Level Summit on Saturday, ready to say hello and sign books (seriously… go ahead… Dave loves it when he’s asked this).
Blog Posts
Back at HQ, we’ve had a number of great blog posts. Adam wrote about playing “type tetris” with Type Driven Development, and Danielle wrote about using the Free monad with multiple algebras. Meanwhile, Pere wrote two great posts about practical uses of refined types and building functional web services with Finch. These are all great posts—check them out if you haven’t done so already!
Jobs
We currently have three gigs on our jobs board:
Data Reply are looking for a big data/Spark engineer in London, Meritocracy are looking for a Scala generalist in Hamburg, and Amaizing Solutions are looking for a “Scala Ninja” in Osnabrueck (hopefully no hiding in shadows or throwing stars required).
Regards,
Noel