scala.Option Cheat Sheet
Tony has a nice post on using Scala’s Option type:
Many people who are coming in to Scala first encounter the Option type, which may be thought of (among other things) as a type-safe null. They also encounter pattern matching as both a new and (relatively) powerful concept, but also one that is easy to understand. This leads to quite a lot of use of pattern matching and often excessively so in what I have observed.
Particularly with a type as trivial as Option, it is almost always possible to do away with pattern matching by using a higher-order function. Use of this function is typically preferred over pattern matching as tighter code.
Source: scala.Option Cheat Sheet.