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Akka Essentials
In Detail
Developers/Architects need to manage the fine balance between the ever increasing load and ever decreasing response latency. Applications need to be designed for Internet scale, which means you need to be skilled in building large distributed, scalable, and concurrent applications. Whether you are building the next Facebook or working for a Fortune 500 organization, you need to be ready to design scalable, concurrent, and fault-tolerant applications. Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM.
"Akka Essentials" will show you the current challenges with Java Scalability and concurrency model and how Akka’s Actor Model can help you design and build applications that are inherently scalable and fault-tolerant. Whether you are building new applications or want to refactor an existing application, you will learn the right techniques to build and scale up in no time.
Approach
This is a step-by-step guide where each chapter will teach you a concept by explaining it with clear and lucid examples– each chapter can be read independently.
Who this book is for
This book is aimed at developers, architects who are building large distributed concurrent and scalable applications using Java/Scala. The book assumes knowledge of Java/JEE concepts but no knowledge of Actor model is assumed.
345 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2012
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28 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 12, 2013
This is a good book for people who want a fast introduction to Akka. It explains, as the title says, the essential features of Akka. If you are looking for advanced topics this is not your book.
The book is well structured and offers a step by step definition of features with some basic examples in both supported languages. As expected, the first chapters cover the basic features of the framework, leaving the more complex for the latter ones.
For every feature or concept explained in the book, the author provides the full code for both Java and Scala. This is remarkable because in some other books only the relevant code is provided. However, he falls in too many repetitions. The same line of code can appear up to 3 times in the same section. Additionally, the quality of the examples don't differ too much from the typical Hello World code, which is ideal for the comprehensiveness of the feature explained, but insufficient for a more advanced user looking for more elaborate examples.
Personally, I missed some real world use cases for each of the features explained in the book, where the effectiveness of Akka could stand out over other alternatives out there.
You can download a sample chapter in here: http://www.packtpub.com/akka-java-app...
Good points
- Good book for beginners
- Full samples in both languages (Java and Scala)
- Covers basic and advanced topics
- Covers even the Typesafe Console (which is not part of the opensource stack)
- Good introduction to parallelism and actors
Bad points:
- Examples are very simple
- Remote actors were explained insufficiently
- Too many repetition of the same code
- Missing real world use cases
The book is well structured and offers a step by step definition of features with some basic examples in both supported languages. As expected, the first chapters cover the basic features of the framework, leaving the more complex for the latter ones.
For every feature or concept explained in the book, the author provides the full code for both Java and Scala. This is remarkable because in some other books only the relevant code is provided. However, he falls in too many repetitions. The same line of code can appear up to 3 times in the same section. Additionally, the quality of the examples don't differ too much from the typical Hello World code, which is ideal for the comprehensiveness of the feature explained, but insufficient for a more advanced user looking for more elaborate examples.
Personally, I missed some real world use cases for each of the features explained in the book, where the effectiveness of Akka could stand out over other alternatives out there.
You can download a sample chapter in here: http://www.packtpub.com/akka-java-app...
Good points
- Good book for beginners
- Full samples in both languages (Java and Scala)
- Covers basic and advanced topics
- Covers even the Typesafe Console (which is not part of the opensource stack)
- Good introduction to parallelism and actors
Bad points:
- Examples are very simple
- Remote actors were explained insufficiently
- Too many repetition of the same code
- Missing real world use cases
March 16, 2013
I'm a scala developer - I just started my first role this week - and we use Akka in the shop that I work at. There are very few akka books out there and I actually got this one from packt a while ago.
The introduction of this book alone may have got me my current role - having actor model knowledge was critical to my interview and now I get to work in a pretty awesome space.
I found this book from Packt website: http://www.packtpub.com/akka-java-app... and it had some fairly heavyweight reviewers in the list so I thought I would give it a try. This is the first book from Packt I've picked up and I thought it was very well presented from the first page giving a nice overview of the actor model and quickly getting into mapreduce examples.
The one thing that did pleasantly surprise me was the inclusion of scala in the book - I did not really see any references to Scala on the web etc and I think most people that will be looking at this book are probably scala developers. The examples in the book are presented in both java and scala so this is a safe bet for you scala devs out there too. For the java guys they may see it as a bit of dilution though.
The only real downside for me is that there is quite a lot of code in the book which makes it a bit harder to read on commutes but I think that is primarily the nature of the task at hand.
The introduction of this book alone may have got me my current role - having actor model knowledge was critical to my interview and now I get to work in a pretty awesome space.
I found this book from Packt website: http://www.packtpub.com/akka-java-app... and it had some fairly heavyweight reviewers in the list so I thought I would give it a try. This is the first book from Packt I've picked up and I thought it was very well presented from the first page giving a nice overview of the actor model and quickly getting into mapreduce examples.
The one thing that did pleasantly surprise me was the inclusion of scala in the book - I did not really see any references to Scala on the web etc and I think most people that will be looking at this book are probably scala developers. The examples in the book are presented in both java and scala so this is a safe bet for you scala devs out there too. For the java guys they may see it as a bit of dilution though.
The only real downside for me is that there is quite a lot of code in the book which makes it a bit harder to read on commutes but I think that is primarily the nature of the task at hand.
March 4, 2013
The Akka Essentials covers indeed the essentials as the name states. It's quick, simple and short but not too in depth. This is good or bad depending how in-depth you are looking for. Code samples in chapters are short & simple and depending on your Java/Scala skills this is either good or bad - akka itself is easy to comprehend from the samples.
If you've just heard about Akka but don't know slightest about it then this "essential" book is a good starting point for learning. Code samples are provided equally in Java and Scala both, so if you're not yet good at Scala that doesn't obstruct reading.
This books is for you when:
- You're looking the first learning source of Akka
- You want compact non-verbose essentials about Akka
- You're not a master of Scala and want Java code samples as well
- You want "Essentials"
This books might not be for you if:
- You already know a little about Akka and just want to learn more
- You want an in-depth bible about Akka
For me as i'm not a master of Scala and just heard and got curious about Akka after getting known to Play! Framework, this book was worth reading.
I read the e-book from the publisher
If you've just heard about Akka but don't know slightest about it then this "essential" book is a good starting point for learning. Code samples are provided equally in Java and Scala both, so if you're not yet good at Scala that doesn't obstruct reading.
This books is for you when:
- You're looking the first learning source of Akka
- You want compact non-verbose essentials about Akka
- You're not a master of Scala and want Java code samples as well
- You want "Essentials"
This books might not be for you if:
- You already know a little about Akka and just want to learn more
- You want an in-depth bible about Akka
For me as i'm not a master of Scala and just heard and got curious about Akka after getting known to Play! Framework, this book was worth reading.
I read the e-book from the publisher
January 1, 2014
Nice introduction to Akka capabilities but too shallow when it comes to the actual content which is a general problem with Packt titles. For example, a process of programmatically starting Actors on a remote hots is hand-waived briefly on 2 pages only (Excuse me? What kind of permissions should one have on a remote host? What should be running there? I assume I can't just start an Actor on any remote host, right?).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews