AKKA Concurrency

The author had some experience in teaching the Akka library, and the text has some useful tips for working with Akka and avoiding some pitfalls. However, the text becomes annoying because of its mixture of jokes, writing style, inflated code snippets, poorly rendered graphics.Given how much the Akka library has changed over the last 8 years, I would advise anyone not to buy this book.

UPDATE: After some time passed since the reading of the book, and seeing as that there is really no other reference that comes even close to this one, I have to bump up my rating to 5/5. Even with all it's problems it is an excellent introduction to the "Actor" way of doing things. After reading this book it is easy to figure out the specifics from the official docs or from various other more specialized "patterns" books out there.I have to disagree with the negative review. After a careful reading of this book I got quite a lot out of it - how to use schedulers, error kernel pattern, introduction to logging, FSM, structuring the application with actors, dead letters, watches, strategies, supervisors.The humor did not bother me. Neither did the example. If you are a cover-to-cover type of reader, I think this book will be beneficial to you.The downside is that the book is riddled with bugs and errors. In fact, some of the code is straight up missing from the book. You can search online for a "fix" by danluu for the book's code (I also have an updated version of the airplane simulation source code - just google "airplane-akka drozdyuk")The other glaring problem (not solved by the "fixed" code above either) is the use of outdated akka version. The new Akka 2.2 deprecates methods like actorFor and ActorRef.isTerminated. I have a question posted regarding this on stackoverflow, which will hopefully get a good answer (or if I figure it out I'll post it there). Just search for "How do you replace actorFor?"I think what happened here is that the author ran out of time (or got bored) and hurried to finish the book, omitting a lot of details. It seems like the book was not proof-read (by a programmer) either. Unfortunately this is, as of today, the best akka book out there for anyone completely new to actors. Hope more akka books are on their way - it sure could use them!

This book introduces main akka concepts with a never ending example you try to remember until chapter 10. The akka FSM dsl keywords are roughtly explained on chapter 9.Thus this book is too expansive.

Being fresh to Scala/Akka ecosystem I did go through several different books before reading this one. After being through first few chapters though I've realised this should have been the first one on Akka. I did enjoy the flow of the book going from the most fundamental Akka principles to more advanced topics in quite natural way. One of the highlights is that all the concepts are explained on one consistent example - Plane/Airport model - which evolves and gains complexity as you go through the book. Together with emphasis on testability and testing patterns this book was well rounded read about the topic which extended my insight into Akka. Would highly recommend as an entry material as well as read for intermediate programmers to get more firm grasp of core Akka concepts.

A single book cannot handle every aspect about a complicated framework like Akka. This book takes your hand and gives you a a tour about all major aspects (Actors, Futures, ActorSystem, DeathWatch, Configuration..) and consists mainly of an instruction how you can put together all these tools into one running program.I like the approach to not repeat the online/API documentation, but to give the reader the advices/recepits the author had to figure out on his own tour through Akka. The chapters "Akka patterns" and "Akka anti patterns" are especially useful in order to not make everyones mistakes again.The book requires some knowledge of Scala but you do not have to be a master. Having the Odersky in your bookshelf can be very handy.