Re: Scala newbie.

I think this is a common case for many FP folks who avoided Java but  
had come over for Scala.  Furthermore, I see an opening for a book  
called, roughly, "Java and its Ecosystem for Scala lovers."  E.g.,  
"thanks" to some Scala projects I got first, I learned Maven and found  
it very useful.  Thanks to IRC #scala folks, I've heard about IDEA and  
found it the best IDE I used in a long time, and  supports Scala so  
well already, and is in fact an excellent Maven GUI.  Maven allows to  
plug in various Java libraries and makes their discovery and usage  
super easy.   Scala is the best thing which happened to Java in a long  
time!

Cheers,
Alexy