With so many features, and so many of them built mainly for library developers, learning the language by yourself can be very daunting. I wonder where I'd be if

With so many features, and so many of them built mainly for library developers, learning the language by yourself can be very daunting. I wonder where I'd be if I had not done a whole lot of the learning from reading a lot of idiomatic code written by well known developers. It's way too easy to end up writing Java with functions, or falling into common pitfalls that make code very hard to maintain in the long run. If you've done the first Odersky course in coursera, the one he does with Roland Kuhn and Erik Meier is a very natural progression that will be far more practical than the original. There are good series of blogs out there that, although somewhat outdated at times, explain concepts far better than the IMO dreadful Typesafe documentation. The twitter school, for instance, will at the very least give you names for features that, if you saw in code, you'd not be able to easily search for, due to their very generic syntax: For instance, context bounds. Another good set of blog posts comes from Bill Venners in the Artima website. Good luck with your quest!