There are many people who have contributed to this book in one form or another and I would like to thank them for their help.

First, I would like to thank Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala and co-founder of Typesafe for inspiring me through his fantastic lectures and two online courses to write this book. The online courses were written together with Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn who are also to be thanked. I am also grateful to many Typesafe employees as well as Zengularity for creating and enhancing such amazing technologies. In particular, I would like to thank Viktor Klang and Jonas Bonér for their numerous tweets with links to great reading material and conference talks. Thanks to Heiko Seeberger and Trond Bjerkestrand for certifying me as a Typesafe Trainer for their Fast Track to Scala course.

A big thank you to the very active Scala Community for all their contributions in terms of open source projects, talks at user groups, and workshops. The meetups at the Stockholm Scala User Group have been a good source of inspiration as well, thanks.

The team at Packt Publishing has been very helpful and has done a great job at all levels in reviewing and producing this book. In particular, I would like to thank Akash Poojary, Neha Nagwekar, Neil Alexander, Miloni Dutia, Kunal Gaikwad, Mukul Pawar, Kunal Parikh, Rubal Kaur, Apeksha Chitnis, Larissa Pinto, Tomer Gabel, Steve Perkins, Eric Le Goff, and Sumeet Sawant for their extensive participation.

Thank you to my employer and awesome colleagues at DevCode for all the encouragement they have given me. Special thanks go to my colleague Erik Wallin for putting much effort into technical review and producing very useful feedback under a tight schedule. Thank you to all my great friends and ex-colleagues as well for their support.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents have always supported me in everything I have been doing and I would like to thank them for that. I would like to thank my lovely wife Malin and awesome kids Valdemar (four years old) and Edvin (three years old) for their great patience and encouragement. Thank you to my parents-in-law for watching after the kids many a times during the writing of this book.

Also, a big thank you to my talented brother Grégoire for realizing this terrific cover picture.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Rod Johnson, creator of the Spring framework and co-founder of SpringSource, for his foreword.