Which issues did you experience with http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/? (It's a slightly older version, but there aren't many changes which would be important for newbies.)

Partially free:

Atomic Scala also has at least a free sample, which expects basically no programming experience at all: http://www.atomicscala.com/free-sample/

Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to speed with Scala as fast as possible: http://www.horstmann.com/scala/index.html