Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Effective Akka

Rate this book
This book will explain how to create Akka applications using best practices based on several years of experience with Actors. The content will be general enough that it would apply to actor-based and asynchronous applications on the whole, but the examples are shown in Akka using the Scala programming interface. The ideal audience are developers who are building systems with Akka and are looking for guidance with regards to patterns and how best to write code that is correct, debuggable and understandable in production.

74 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2013

9 people are currently reading
71 people want to read

About the author

Jamie Allen

3 books2 followers

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
13 (13%)
4 stars
43 (43%)
3 stars
31 (31%)
2 stars
12 (12%)
1 star
0 (0%)
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
102 reviews2 followers
April 24, 2014
This book reads like a couple of blog posts compiled together for no appropriate reason. Disappointing.
Profile Image for Ingolf Wagner.
1 review1 follower
July 20, 2016
It's a good choice for beginners. There are some nice tips in it. Luckily it's not too big so you can read it quite fast. But I expected more.
Profile Image for Marcin Cylke.
49 reviews6 followers
January 27, 2015
A bunch of "best practices". Not in-depth enough for my taste.
Profile Image for Venkatesh-Prasad.
225 reviews
October 30, 2018
A short book focused on good practices to use Akka. Assuming the reader is well versed with Akka (in Scala) and familiar with concurrent and distributed systems, it covers nuances involved in making Akka applications more performant via concurrency and parallelism; good amount of focus on considering compute resources. While the nuances it describes is applicable to distributed systems, the exposition does not make it explicit.

A good book to read after picking up Akka and, preferably, reading about concurrency issues.
52 reviews1 follower
October 8, 2017
One of the first Akka books. Now it is just too short and dated
38 reviews3 followers
February 10, 2020
Getting a little dated, but enough content to make it worth reading through as it’s short too.
Profile Image for Sebastian Gebski.
1,234 reviews1,416 followers
April 26, 2015
I'll start with an interesting fact - that was my 2nd approach to "Effective Akka". The first one was a year ago, but just after the few pages I've decided to give up for now. If I remember well, that was about a high threshold in terms of required knowledge level. So now I was a bit reluctant - did I learn enough to go through this time? And ... now I'm a bit confused, because I don't really think about myself as a Masta-hakka, but I've pretty much swallowed the book in 1.5 day without stopping. And I can't really recall what in particular was that challenging a year ago.

Odd.

Anyway, back to the book. I'll try to be brief.

1.) It's not for beginners. You already have to be acknowledged with Akka.
2.) It's about practical / situational usage of Akka - don't expect many low-level undocumented functions, but rather sort of design patterns (because seriously, you can twist the way you're using Akka VERY easily)
3.) It's very brief - and it's a biggest issue I had with it

If you're interested in reactive programming & Akka in particular, it's a no brainer - go for this book without hesitation. But if you're just starting your adventures with Akka, don't start it here.
Profile Image for ARahman  Rashed.
12 reviews10 followers
July 31, 2015
It doesn't require an "advanced practising level" for Akka, not much of design patterns were mentioned (exactly 2 design patterns).
You could just tell by looking that some of the written code weren't logically accurate.
The last chapter was good, the same applies for the examples in the whole book.
Generally it was a light book - like 80 pages or so- with some good catches, but it won't be a sufficient reference for developing Akka apps, you might like to go for "Akka in Action" for that exact reason.
4 reviews
August 18, 2014
I just want to emphasize what the author clearly states at the beginning of the book - it makes certain assumptions as to the reader's knowledge of Scala, Akka and asynchronous/multithreaded programming in general.
For me, even having grasped the basics, it was not enough. Only after getting back to the book having had hands-on contact with a commercial Akka project, have I understood the practical patterns and managed to absorb the knowledge contained within this title.

It's great. :)
Profile Image for Tomasz.
108 reviews50 followers
May 26, 2015
Good book about using Akka in a proper way. Shows many patterns and anti-patterns so you can avoid mistakes and apply good practices on your daily coding.

One important note: this book requires deeper than basic knowledge about Akka, so if you are newbie in actors world, plan some additional time to read Akka specs or another book about Akka :)
209 reviews18 followers
May 27, 2014
This book is short, but every advice there is priceless for every Akka practitioner. Some people say that they already knew most of the things in the book; well, they are probably working in excellent teams. Lucky them.
Profile Image for Daniel.
Author 3 books38 followers
September 26, 2013
A lot of the advice was not new to me, and, as is to expected given the page count, none of this goes into a lot of depth. Still, this is a pretty good overview of current best practices when using Akka.
Profile Image for Greg.
29 reviews3 followers
September 27, 2015
It's really a good book. I suggest that all Akka beginner developers should read it ASAP. While reading it I got so many: "I thought so" moments, that I'm just disappointed I haven't read it way sooner.
Profile Image for Jeff.
4 reviews2 followers
April 29, 2016
This is an excellent and informative book about successful actor system architecture. It assumes a significant degree of familiarity with the topic, but also contains code examples.
Profile Image for Stephen Corgiat.
4 reviews1 follower
October 13, 2015
I found this rather short book helpful, but wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Akka. Contains common patterns and best practices which aren't found in the online Akka documentation.
2 reviews
July 5, 2016
This book is very concise but very useful.

It has many essential information about how to write effective akka / actor based applications.

Profile Image for Joe.
760 reviews
January 11, 2017
Pretty thin on content, but a useful sequence of tips at the end.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.