Preface -- 1. Plasmonic Materials for Surface-Enhanced and tip-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy, (M.A. Young, J.A. Dieringer, and R.P. van Duyne) -- 2. Towards single molecule sensitivity in surface enhanced Raman scattering, (M. Futamata, and Y. Maruyama) -- 3. Near field effects in tip-enhanced Raman scattering, (Y. Inouye, P. Verma, T. Ichimura, and -- S. Kawata) -- 4. Use of tip-enhanced vibrational spectroscopy for analytical applications in chemistry, biology, and materials science, (T. Schmid, B.-S. Yeo, W. Zhang, and R. Zenobi) -- 5. Tip-enhanced Optical Spectroscopy of Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes, (A. Hartschuh, H. Qian, -- A.J. Meixner, N. Anderson, and L. Novotny) -- 6. Scanning Nano-Raman Spectroscopy of Silicon and Other Semiconducting Materials, (D. Mehtani, -- N. Lee, R.D. Hartschuh, A. Kisliuk, M.D. Foster, -- A.P. Sokolov, and J.F. Maguire) -- 7. Near-field Optical Structuring and Manipulation Based on Local Field Enhancement in the Vicinity of Metal Nano Structures, (R. Bachelot) -- 8. Apertureless near-field microscopy of second-harmonic generation, (A. Zayats) -- 9. Single emitters and optical antennas, (B. Hecht).