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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a concise way to learn Clojure or Scala? I'd like to learn one of these languages, but I don't want to wade through interminable books to do it. Rather, I'd prefer it if there were a place where I could quickly pick up some basics and get a few ideas/exercises I could work on to discover the language on my own, a bit like "Learn Python in 10 Minutes" (http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python).

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For Clojure, this is a good place to start: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_Clojure

I also like the lengthier, but most excellent, tutorial by Mark Volkmann: http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html

Project Euler worked well for me as warm-up exercises. And I just found a Wiki of Project Euler solutions in Clojure: http://clojure-euler.wikispaces.com/

Fantastic, thanks. Especially the project Euler idea, I was under the impression that they were Python-specific problems (in retrospect, I have no idea why I ever thought that).

You may be thinking of the Python Challenge; I could see them being mentioned together when someone asks for programming puzzle sites.

Probably, yes. It's one of those things you never realise are wrong until you think about them.

+1 Mark Volkmann's tutorial. That's what got me started on learning Clojure. Of course, once I'd gone through that, I still waded through this book and got a lot of value from it:

http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure (which was current at the time that I read it but might be a bit out of date by now since I think it covers Clojure 1.1)

Yep, I've saved that tutorial and am reading it, it looks comprehensive and on one page. I'll have a look at the book too, thanks.

Try the book, "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" which covers Clojure, Scala and a bunch of other languages. I've only just got it and it looks good so far.

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Prog...

For Scala you could check First Steps to Scala(http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/steps.html).

For Clojure you have very nice video introductions by Rich Hickey on blip.tv.

Ah, thank you, that primer looks to be exactly what I wanted.

Scala can run in command line mode, which is pretty useful for learning.

If you are coming from Java, as I was, the learning curve was pretty shallow towards doing useful things. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-scala01228....

Thank you, I come from Python but I should be able to make some sense out of it...

One of the hardest parts of getting into Scala for me (coming from mostly Java and Python) was that the yield keyword means something significantly different from what it means in Python. This actually broke my heart early on, as Python's generators are one of my favorite features from any language.

Delimited continuations in 2.8 make up for it and then some, but they're much harder to grok, imo. Python's yield gets you 80% of the same benefits with about 20% of the brain bending.

The Tour of Scala is very succinct. It is basically a list of language features and how they manifest in Scala.

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/104

Each feature has both a description and an example. I became productive very quickly using almost exclusively this tour.

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