Akka in Action

The book is a scattered mess and nearly unusable. I ordered it expecting Java examples are there are none. Everything is in Scala. If you buy expecting to get Akka up and running, good luck. You are going to need it. Burned by a Manning book again. When will I learn?

Nice book and there is a lot to learn. I personally enjoyed learning this book.

This book is perfect from all perspectives. I couldn't have asked for a better Akka book. A must read for every scala programmer.

Good

Once again, I wish I could give a book four and a half stars. I really like this one, but I don't quite "love" it in the same way that I love great, five-star literature. That being said, it has been three years since I did any projects with Akka, Scala and the Simple Build Tool (sbt). "Akka in Action" has been a nice refresher course for me, as well as a very fine what-is-Akka guide. The book does dive a bit deeper into Akka and its actor programming model than I really wanted to go. But I admire how well Akka (to quote the authors) "provides a comprehensive set of tools for building distributed and concurrent applications." The book also has gotten me interested in doing some projects again on the Scala/JVM side of the world, after a lot of JavaScript and AngularJS. I do agree, at least partly, with the criticism that the book's "Hello, World" example should come sooner than Chapter 7. But Chapter 2, titled "Up and running," does offer a simpler-than-Hello-World project that has you use Akka, Scala and sbt together. You fetch a project template, build a (truly) "minimal Akka app for the cloud" and deploy it to Heroku. So that mitigates the Chapter 7 criticism somewhat. In any case, this is a very good book. I haven't tried all of the code examples yet. But the ones that I have done have worked exactly as described. The authors have put a great deal of hard work into writing this book, and it shows as you read the text, study the diagrams and work the code examples. "Akka in Action" is worthy of your consideration, especially you are wanting to move into the world of distributed and concurrent applications and/or if you are learning Scala and sbt and looking for more things to do with them.My thanks to Manning for providing an advance reading copy for review.

A good book to learn about Akka and the actor model. It covers how to realize basic actor model in Akka along with important extensions such as futures, agents, FSM, remoting, clustering, and persistence. It provides a good introduction to fault tolerance in the context of actor modelIt could have been a great book if 1) it used simple and precise language (e.g., "which takes two argument lists", did you mean two arguments?) and 2) it did not have typos in code and results.Both these errors will slow down reading and comprehension; specifically, for folks who are not well-versed with Scala. To be fair, the book does say reader should know some Scala. However, I think the book would have been more accessible to non-Scala devs (e.g., Kotlin devs) if they wouldn't have to look up if a specific nuance was a typo or otherwise.Also, all of the code bits are not in the book. While this is generally fine, I felt that some important code bits were missing and this slowed down reading and comprehension.

I'll update this review as I work through the book. Initial thoughts:Chapter 2 dives straight into some complex code without explaining much. You'll infer things like ! is how actors send fire-and-forget messages, but the book should explain basics like thisNext chapter is TDD and I'm not sure why this is the so early in the book. I still want to learn the fundamentals and we're testing alreadyChapter 6 is on remoting but I didn't want to go that deep yet. Still looking more for fundamentals.The authors provided a lot of code to accompany this book. It is available on github and I was trivial to setup and run with Intellij. You don't even need an IDE however as SBT is a very powerful tool (REPL and runner) from the command-line.It would have been nice to see a hello-world example, and there is something of that nature but you need to skip all the way to Chapter 7. So again, the flow of the book could have been better thought out IMO. One minor annoyance is some of the examples, like the REPL Remoting are an image in the book, so you have to type it out by hand, ie, no cut and paste.found a typo:"But the problem with these properties is that you never know for sure that these properties exit."Also found other typos, so a bit careless in editing here. I guess one aspect of reading a just published book is being a proofreader for the editor, sigh.I've been reading with the online Google Books reader in epub format. I really like this since I can add notes and have all my books in one place (Kindle reader on Mac only works with Kindle purchased books and not all books are available in on Kindle, and many are not, like all Manning books!). The epub format has been good but at least one table was all garbled and I had to resort to the PDF version, and the images (tables) don't scale as well as the text so I end up squinting.The writing style is just ok, sometimes a bit awkward. Hoping it will get better

One of the best reference / guides for learning Akka. It covers all important aspects of Akka and gives clear and simple to follow examples. It also covers the newest additions - Akka Streams and HTTP, so you're all set to jump right into developing and end-to-end reactive application after reading this book and the reference documentation. It really is the best and most up to date book about Akka out there currently and we endorse it as the team behind the project :-)

Good:- Very well written.- Great examples.- Clear and deep explanations. Perhaps the best book I have found so far on explaining akka streams.- Can be followed by anyone with experience on the JVM, not a must to be an experienced Scala developer.- Really thank you to the authors for writing this book.Opportunities:- Wish there was a section on Kubernetes and Akka Clusters.- A follow up book to cover some of the latest topics on Akka would be amazing.

No es un libro para principiantes. Akka es complicado para el recién llegado y este libro no toma concesiones.