In early September 2014, we published Functional Programming in Scala. It is now available from all major booksellers, and from the publisher at manning.com/bjarnason. It’s available as a beautiful paper book, on Kindle and other e-book readers, and as a PDF file.

I just want to share my personal story of how this book came to exist. A much shorter version of this story became the preface for the finished book, but here is the long version.

Around 2006 I was working in Austin and coming up on m...