Christos K. K. Loverdos is a research-inclined computer software professional. He has been working in the software industry for more than ten years, designing and implementing flexible, enterprise-level systems and was a member of the core team that led the design and implementation of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games portal (www.athens2004.com). Apostolos Syropoulos is a computer scientist. He has been instrumental in the spread of TeX and other related document preparation tools inside and outside Greece and is currently working as a computer educator.

• Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Core features; 3. Advanced features; 4. Parser builders; 5. XML processing; 6. GUI programming; 7. Concurrent programming; 8. On paths and a bit of algebraic abstractions; 9. Virtual files coming into existence; 10. Compositional file matching; 11. Searching, iterating, traversing; 12. The expression problem; 13. A computer algebra system; Appendix A. Multimedia processing; Appendix B. Distributing a Scala application along with Scala itself; Appendix C. Working with the compiler and the interpreter; Appendix D. Scala's grammar; References; Author index; Subject index.

"Loverdos and Syropoulos provide a well-constructed introduction to this language." J. Beidler, University of Scranton for Choice Magazine