2. subscribe to the scala-user mailing list and ask any questions you may have - some developers there are very advanced, so don't get intimidated by the topics, as beginners' questions are very welcome
I got started with "Scala for the Impatient" and I like its style. You can still get about one third of the book from TypeSafe's website, which is enough to get the ball rolling. It's written for Scala 2.9 so it doesn't have Futures in it, plus you should ignore the stuff about actors in later chapters (actors from the standard library are deprecated, Akka actors have been the norm for some time - and at first you should ignore actors completely, since that's a big topic). But that's OK. In case you'd prefer another book, make sure to not read anything published before 2010 as (IMHO) everything published before 2010 is awful.
Since I wrote that article a couple of newer books happened, that I haven't read, like "Scala in Action" or "Atomic Scala" and thus cannot recommend, but I've heard good things about, so ask others or read reviews, etc...
There's also an advanced book called "Functional Programming in Scala", by Paul Chiusano and Rúnar Bjarnason, I've read about 8 chapters from it and it's a really, really good book on FP design & concepts. However it's a hard read, because while the language is approachable and doesn't assume much Scala knowledge, it's the kind of book that's designed around mind-bending (SICP-style) exercises - it takes me about 1 week to get through a chapter and right now I don't have time for the rest, but with each chapter my knowledge expands :-)
If you like an IDE, IntelliJ IDEA 13 for Scala is everything you'd expect out of an IDE, but as I've said in my blog post, when I'm learning a new language I don't want to bother with learning a new toolset too, so I start with a comfortable plain-text editor and work from there.
When you get stuck, I must emphasize on nr.2 - ask questions on scala-user - beginners are always welcome.
Scala for the Impatient (you can get part of the book as a free pdf from Typesafe). Although not designed for learning the language the O'Reilly Scala Cookbook is also very good.
