You can't be a Scala programmer and say you've never used pattern matching — it is one of the most powerful Scala features. It allows one to test lots of values and conditions without nested and chained if-else expressions.
This article is for the Scala programmer who is either, a) only getting started with Scala, or b) has only used pattern matching in its basic form — as a switch-on-steroids or to deconstruct case classes.