Underscore's Scala books are now open source | Hacker News Reader

Underscore's Scala books are now open source

underscore.io

242 pointsnoelwelsh34 comments

Seriously, big thanks to Underscore for this. The Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless is amazing and I'd recommend it to anyone who is an intermediate Scala developer that wants to step up it's game.

I'm curious how up to date those books are with the latest version of Play/Slick, given how fast conventions move in those projects. The Play book seems to be from 2015, that sounds quite outdated.

Play is the only book that is not up-to-date. Essential Slick is up-to-date with the latest version of Slick, Advanced Scala is up-to-date with the latest version of Cats, etc.

I'm the author of the Play book. On the subject of that book...

There are only two significant things that are out of date. A minor tweak in the JSON library and the new DI system. The former is an easy fix. The latter will require a new chapter. I'm happy to chat to anyone who is interested in collaborating on these parts.

They should redirect to https if they are accepting payment / donations.

I've got the shapeless book and found it really good. Keen to read the Cats one now. Does anyone know where you can get a hard copy. ?

No hard copies yet for the Cats book---it isn't quite finished. When it is finished we'll look at creating hard copy. If you sign up with a real email address you'll get updates.

As for https---that's something we'll have to look into. Not sure what the situation is but I thought the Gumroad popup was over https.

Ok, thanks Noel.

Oh I see, the popup is https...

Is there a direct link to built PDFs somewhere, or do we have to go through the whole process of signing up to Gumroad and having the PDF emailed to us?

Not yet. At some point we'll just host them our website but we haven't had time to do that. You can use a fake email to sign up to Gumroad if you want. Otherwise you can build the books yourself, which just requires Docker and a few hours to download the massive Latex Docker image.

I'm happy to report that using junk but plausible email address works. It doesn't ask for anything other than the email once

Congratulations for the effort and contribution!

Thank you! Hope you enjoy the books :)

Are these books also available as single page HTMLs?

yes, they are

What meras said. PDF, single page HTML, and ePUB are the formats we provide.

I have bought Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless, which is excellent. Can't wait to read the Cats book!

I don't have any use for the foreseeable future but I congratulate the effort and the contribution!

This is awesome. Thanks guys!

It's great to hear it's useful!

thanks, it is just in time for me, I'm looking for book about slick :)

A decent Slick book is desperately needed.

While the Slick documentation is accurate and nicely written it is really slim. I honestly think the paucity of documentation is holding back wider adoption.

As a sometime contributor to the slick project, I think the "Essential Slick" book, that is one of those that has been open-sourced here, does fill a gap in the documentation. I've recommended it in the past and now I can just link to it. Big thank you to Underscore for doing this.

It's an easy read with good examples that helps you get to grips with the concepts.

Thanks a lot :)

Scala kotlin war?

I think one can live with Kotlin. Scala is too obtuse and Clojure is just bad and pays a heavy performance penalty when interacting with Java due to internal usage of reflection if no type hints are used.

The only thing I'm missing in Kotlin are some metaprogramming facilities.

I'll bite: in what way is Scala obtuse?

> I'll bite: in what way is Scala obtuse?

(obtuse might be the wrong word; I'm not a native speaker)

In the small: http://www.wartremover.org/doc/warts.html (individually nothing prohibitive, but the sheer amount of caveats is frightening)

In the large: things like binary compatibility breaking between releases (note that this is on a different level from standard library incompatibilities, which are expected); not sure if this is an issue any more, I have last used it around 2009/2010.

It's a style guide (and a static style checker), not a list of caveats. Mutable values are not a caveat. It's like referring to http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/checks.html as a list of frightening caveats.

Scala "is too obtuse".

Clojure "is just bad".

Kotlin "one can live with".

Hmm... Lol

It's pretty lame to create a fake profile just to post a lame troll post.

I think giving away the books for free is good. However I just had a look and the courses ain't cheap. A good way to generate customers huh? The way I read your post it seemed that you guys were broke and needed a donation.

Hey if I got that wrong sorry in advance.

"broke and needed a donation" --> This is not the case, and we wouldn't open source the books if we wanted to make more money. I could talk more about this, as I think the business angle is interesting and on topic for HN, but I'm at a conference right now.

Tiny update on this. So far today 3808 books have been downloaded and about $81 in donations have been made. In a normal day we'd sell less 4 or 5 books and make between $100 and $200.

Could you talk more about the business angle, if you get the chance?

I'm curious how you view selling vs giving away books and how it ties in to other revenue streams.

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