Essential Slick is a new book we’ve been working on, which is now available for early access. That means, we’ll be making updates before we announce a final version, although all the chapters are available. This post tells you a bit more about the book and its origin.

Judging by the projects we’re asked to help with, Slick is a popular database library. When we’ve been working with teams who have adopted Slick, there are a few areas that seem confusing at first. The aim of Essential Slick is to get developers into the core parts of Slick they need to know, quickly. It’s around 100 pages in total, so we figure it can be worked through in just a day or two.

Essential

We can’t cover all of Slick in 100 pages, but we’ve captured what we think is essential:

Querying, inserting, updating and deleting (obviously!), using map , filter , and other combinators.

Schema modelling, covering primary keys, optional values, representing rows.

Getting away from database-level types and up into meaningful application types as soon as possible.

Working with joins and grouping – probably the chapter I’ll have open the most.

Making use of a feature of Slick called Plain SQL, which is essential when you find Slick producing odd queries.

You’ll find a preview of the first two chapters on the Essential Slick book page.

Slick 2.1

Slick 3.0 was just released, but this text is for Slick 2.1. Our plan is to move the text out of Early Access and then on to Slick 3.0 — providing the text is useful to developers! Let us know what you make of it via our Gitter Channel, or email.