After spending a fair amount of personal time over the past six months studying the Scala programming language, I found some of the Martin Odersky lessons on coursera.org useful in clarifying esoteric features of the language. In particular, his explanation of how the compiler methodically reduces for comprehensions into function calls was useful in understanding this powerful and concise construct.

My suggestion for anyone interested in learning Scala is to immerse yourself as much as possible and thoroughly study all major language features. The reality is that even though Scala makes the transition for Java developers somewhat painless by supporting an imperative style, the true power of the language cannot be realized without dispensing with those habits.