To use scala effectively, you must use SBT. Almost every scala library and framework is built using it. There are tons of productivity enhancing tools wrapped in plug-ins for it. It is java, scala and scalajs aware, and incrementally compiles large projects if you use it. The documentation for it is good from version 0.12 on. You can learn 90% of what you need to do scala builds in SBT in 4 hours by reading the documentation and the walk-through tutorial. Eventually you may need to write your own tasks, but 90% of those tasks are covered by the existing plug-ins available, and you can easily modify or create a new task by writing some simple scala function on your first day using the tool without having to publish a plug-in to some repo for it to work.

I absolutely would reccommend SBT for beginner scala users. It's a must to use and understand it, as much a part of understanding scala as understanding for comprehensions, case classes, and if/else expressions.

Using SBT with Scala is certainly encouraged, but you can use other build tools. At work we're successfully using gradle without too many problems. The only things that are slightly weird are the not-so-perfect plugins for gradle, but that is understandable considering they are mostly community driven (sometimes only a one person even).

> the not-so-perfect plugins for gradle

Could be because Gradle up to version 2.x provided only Groovy for writing plugins and build scripts. Gradle 3.0 was released a few months ago, and provides both Kotlin and Groovy for plugins and builds, and even prefers Kotlin for writing plugins. Perhaps the "not-so-perfect" situation will change as plugin providers switch over.

I recently looked into Groovy's apparent popularity at #17 on the TIOBE ranking and found Baidu was giving a result 12 times too high and Yahoo a result 20 times too high, both of which would skew the ranking. Groovy's real ranking is somewhere below that of #50 ranked Clojure. These results are being used to promote Groovy as successful to the Apache Software Foundation directorship. I can understand Gradleware wanting to switch to a language with a seemingly more honest approach to promotion.

Libraries and frameworks use SBT because they need to cross-build for multiple scala versions - that isn't something you normally need to do as a "regular" developer. Even post-0.12 the documentation is a lot lot worse than maven's. You can absolutely use Scala effectively without it.

I was hired to work on an existing codebase that used sbt. I had domain knowledge and plenty of general development experience but I hadn't used Java, the JVM, or Scala for production code before. My previous background was C, Fortran, Python, and JavaScript (scientific computing and web dev).