Become a master.

People taking the Scala Essentials course have been asking me for almost 2 years:

“Hey Daniel, nice Scala course! Where can I practice some Scala now?” “Tail recursion seems pretty important. I’m playing with this sorting function but can’t get it right. Can you help?” “Daniel, can you give me some Scala projects or problems I can practice on?” “Daniel, I really like your course. Where can I find some practice problems I could use to improve my functional programming? I’m looking for a new Scala position soon.” “Hey Daniel, tail recursion blew my mind! Can you do more exercises?” “Daniel, I’m looking for a new Scala developer job and I’m having my interview in a few weeks, do you know of any place where I can prepare?”

Functional programming is not for everyone. It’s hard to master, because it’s hard to think code in a different way. In this course, you will become a functional programming guru. You will be writing 3300+ lines of purely functional Scala code, over 50+ practical problems, ranging from easy 1-2-liners to real beasts.

After you finish this course, your mind will change. You will dream in functional programming. If you’re looking to internalize the functional programming mindset after learning Scala, this course is for you. This course is 100% compatible with both Scala 3 and Scala 2.

"Tail Recursion meme"

Let me tell you straight: you will practice the S[_] out of tail recursion. You will dream in tail recursion. EVERYTHING WE WRITE is tail-recursive. Here are some stats:

15+ hours of professionally-recorded HD video
50+ problems
3300+ lines of code
2 implicit niceties to impress your problem asker
everything @tailrec
1 mindset changed (yours, I hope!)

Be Pure

Mutable data structures wreak havoc in multithreaded and distributed applications, make 20 lines of code take hours to read and understand (no joke) and make a snowflake look like Hulk when compared to your code. Not to mention the endless stack overflows caused by stack recursion.

We reject that right off the bat. We practice immutable data structures, tail-recursion and pure functional programming. That means no variables, no loops, no mutation, no setters, no i++.

This course will teach you to write code that’s strong as a tank and pure like a baby.

Ace all the interviews.

If you’re looking to get a software developer position in Scala, or looking to change jobs, this course will be your Cracking the Coding Interview.

All the problems are framed as exercises you need to complete in a time frame, just like a normal interview. At the end, I will guide you with a solution and in-depth explanations. I won’t just tell you how it works, I will tell you how I got the idea, and how to approach the problems.

Take the proven path.

I’ve spent 8+ years writing thousands upon thousands of lines of Scala. I know what works, what doesn’t and how to approach problems. Make no mistake, I know you already know the Scala syntax, but I hand-picked these problems to teach you how to think.

For this course, I have:

deconstructed the mental model so you don’t have to bang your head against the wall
selected 50+ Google-style interview problems to showcase various approaches and techniques
sequenced them by difficulty so you can improve your level bit by bit
applied everything in 3300+ lines of code you will write with me

Daniel Ciocîrlan

I'm a software engineer and the founder of Rock the JVM.

I'm a software engineer and the founder of Rock the JVM. I started the Rock the JVM project out of love for Scala and the technologies it powers - they are all amazing tools and I want to share as much of my experience with them as I can.

As of February 2024, I've taught Java, Scala, Kotlin and related tech (e.g. Cats, ZIO, Spark) to 100000+ students at various levels and I've held live training sessions for some of the best companies in the industry, including Adobe and Apple. I've also taught university students who now work at Google and Facebook (among others), I've held Hour of Code for 7-year-olds and I've taught more than 35000 kids to code.

I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science and I wrote my Bachelor and Master theses on Quantum Computation. Before starting to learn programming, I won medals at international Physics competitions.