In early September 2014, we published Functional Programming in Scala. It is now available from all major booksellers, and from the publisher at manning.com/bjarnason. It’s available as a beautiful paper book, on Kindle and other e-book readers, and as a PDF file.

I just want to share my personal story of how this book came to exist. A much shorter version of this story became the preface for the finished book, but here is the long version.

Around 2006 I was working in Austin and coming up on my 8th anniversary as an enterprise Java programmer. I had started to notice that I was making a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. I had a copy of the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns on my desk that I referred to frequently, and I built what I thought were elegant object-oriented designs. Every new project started out well enough, but became a big ball of mud after a while. My once-elegant class hierarchies gathered bugs, technical debt, and unimplemented features. Making changes started to feel like trudging through a swamp. I was never confident that I wasn’t introducing defects as I went. My code was difficult to test or reuse, and impossible to reason about. My productivity plummeted, and a complete rewrite became inevitable. It was a vicious cycle.

In looking for a more disciplined approach, I came across Haskell and functional programming. Here was a community of people with a sound methodology for reasoning about their programs. In other words, they actually knew what they were doing. I found a lot of good ideas and proceeded to import them to Java. A little later I met Tony Morris, who had been doing the same, on IRC. He told me about this new JVM language, Scala. Tony had a library called Scalaz (scala-zed) that made FP in Scala more pleasant, and I started contributing to that library. One of the other people contributing to Scalaz was Paul Chiusano, who was working for a company in Boston. In 2008 he invited me to come work with him, doing Scala full time. I sold my house and everything in it, and moved to Boston.

Paul co-organized the Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts, a group that met monthly at Google’s office in Cambridge. It was a popular group, mainly among Java programmers who were looking for something better. But there was a clear gap between those who had come to Scala from an FP perspective and those who saw Scala as just a better way to write Java. In April 2010 another of the co-organizers, Nermin Serifovic, said he thought there was “tremendous demand” for a book that would bridge that gap, on the topic of functional programming in Scala. He suggested that Paul and I write that book. We had a very clear idea of the kind of book we wanted to write, and we thought it would be quick and easy. More than four years later, I think we have made a good book.

Paul and I hope to convey in this book some of the excitement that we felt when we were first discovering FP. It’s encouraging and empowering to finally feel like we’re writing comprehensible software that we can reuse and confidently build upon. We want to invite you to the world of programming as it could be and ought to be.

– Rúnar Óli Bjarnason

Boston, August 2014