(i guess most of the Scala guys went to burning Man ;-}<p>1. read the (many) "levels" posts<p><a href="http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610" rel="nofollow">http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610</a><p><a href="http://blog.tmorris.net/critique-of-oderskys-scala-levels/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.tmorris.net/critique-of-oderskys-scala-levels/</a><p><a href="http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/2011/01/martin-odersky-scala-levels.html" rel="nofollow">http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/2011/01/martin-odersky-sca...</a><p><a href="http://www.fogus.me/thunks/scala.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fogus.me/thunks/scala.html</a><p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247528/efficacy-of-sticking-to-just-the-functional-paradigm-in-scala" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247528/efficacy-of-stick...</a><p><a href="http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-stages-of-functional-programming.html" rel="nofollow">http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-stages-of-functio...</a><p>2. The staircase book (1st ed available free) and Cay Horstmann's new book (many chapters freely avail in PDF)<p>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:<p><a href="http://www.assembla.com/code/scala-eclipse-toolchain/git/nodes/src/compiler/scala/tools/nsc/settings/ScalaSettings.scala" rel="nofollow">http://www.assembla.com/code/scala-eclipse-toolchain/git/nod...</a><p>4. The "user" mailing list, Stackoverflow and IRC are pretty beginner-friendly.<p>5. The REPL: power mode, repl-utils, ..<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736174/var-dump-in-scala" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736174/var-dump-in-scala</a>