Moving away from a well established and mature language such as Java requires some pretty good reasons. Before pragmatically trying out some of the apparent differences between Java and Scala in order to get acquainted with the Scala syntax, we are going to clarify what makes Scala so attractive.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
The advantages of using Scala for Java projects
Getting familiar with the syntax of the language through a crash course following an interactive session, including case classes, operations on collections, and a glimpse of some useful features such as options, tuples, maps, pattern matching, and string interpolation