Lift in Action

Appendix A. Introduction to Scala

Scala is a powerful combination of both object oriented and functional programming approaches, and its language constructs can often seem somewhat terse to newcomers. This appendix aims to give you a rough guide to Scala and serve as enough background for you to make full use of this book. Understand that this is only a top-level view of Scala features and it can’t cover anywhere near all of Scala’s capabilities. For a more detailed introduction to the broader language, I suggest picking up a copy of Nilanjan Raychaudhuri’s Scala in Action, also from Manning.

As a language, Scala only has a few core features. The vast majority of features are implemented as libraries, which results in a language that has a ...