• The book covers almost all of the concepts in Scala in a very concise format.
• More emphasis on learning by doing.
• Lot of exercise problems at the end of each chapter. It is highly recommended to try them out.
• The concepts have been divided into varying difficultly levels and the chapters have been arranged so as to facilitate good understanding.
• The initial few chapters help Java programs to get onto programming in Scala by not scaring with Functional style of programming.

Some of the not so good things:

• You dont get to see lot of idomatic scala code. Unlike Core Java where the examples gave the reader an idea of how to organise code. It is acceptable considering the size of the book.
• The questions dont have solutions so its difficult to evaluate if your code follows best practices.

This would not be the last book you would read, I am sure once you finish this book you would be in a better position to read other Scala books and try to grasp the advanced scala concepts and also learn to write idomatic scala code.

The ideal approach to read this book is to practice the exercises and also keep the Scala API documentation handy.

Being a newbie with lot of failed efforts to learn Scala, I found this book to be easy to pick Scala concepts and also familiarize with the code.