
Underscore's Scala books are now open source - noelwelsh
http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2017/05/29/why-we-open-sourced-our-books.html
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daddykotex
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.

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absove
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seems to be from 2015, that sounds quite outdated.

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davegurnell
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There are only two significant things that are out of date.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.

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stephen123
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. ?

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noelwelsh
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.

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stephen123
Ok, thanks Noel.

Oh I see, the popup is https...

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lol768
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?

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noelwelsh
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.

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iamalchemist
Congratulations for the effort and contribution!

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noelwelsh
Thank you! Hope you enjoy the books :)

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marvindanig
Are these books also available as single page HTMLs?

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meras
yes, they are

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

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

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kkanojia
This is awesome. Thanks guys!

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noelwelsh
It's great to hear it's useful!

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

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JackFr
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.

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smootoo
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.

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shanavasm
Thanks a lot :)

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scalakotlinwar
Scala kotlin war?

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_pmf_
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.

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

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_pmf_
> 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](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.

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morsch
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](http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/checks.html)
as a list of frightening caveats.

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codedevgoo
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.

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noelwelsh
"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.

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noelwelsh
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.

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SomeStupidPoint
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.

