Actually, my coworkers who are Java programmers complained of the opposite - they felt the Scala books didn't link in Java enough and assumed experience in thin

Actually, my coworkers who are Java programmers complained of the opposite - they felt the Scala books didn't link in Java enough and assumed experience in things like Ruby and the like. I found Venkat's book to be a good solid, terse start which gives you the bulk of what you need to start poking around. After that, the O'Reilly book is solid for really building meat. It's also available for free online if you want to really look at how usable it is for you: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/