What are the best resources for a complete beginner to learn Scala from?

(i guess most of the Scala guys went to burning Man ;-}

1. read the (many) "levels" posts

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610

http://blog.tmorris.net/critique-of-oderskys-scala-levels/

http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/2011/01/martin-odersky-sca...

http://www.fogus.me/thunks/scala.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247528/efficacy-of-stick...

http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-stages-of-functio...

2. The staircase book (1st ed available free) and Cay Horstmann's new book (many chapters freely avail in PDF)

3. Teh toolchain: the IDEA plugin works prety well, and the Eclipse plugin probably does also. You'll need to get familiar with compiler error messages, warnings and flags:

http://www.assembla.com/code/scala-eclipse-toolchain/git/nod...

4. The "user" mailing list, Stackoverflow and IRC are pretty beginner-friendly.

5. The REPL: power mode, repl-utils, ..

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736174/var-dump-in-scala