Thanks! If you like Creative Scala I hope you'll consider Essential Scala, which is our follow on course. It's available as a book and we also deliver face-to-face training online and at public courses: http://underscore.io/training/courses/essential-scala/

We wrote Essential Scala because we didn't think any of the existing introductory books meshed with how we want to teach. Essential Scala focuses on core patterns of functional programming, and only introduces Scala features as necessary to support these patterns.

I'm happy to email you (and anyone else who is interested) an excerpt. I'm noel at underscore dot io.