I'm a freshman to Akka, please recommend me some useful learning material... Thanks a lot.

[Qian Liu]

Hello everybody,

I'm new-comer to Akka, the official documents for Akka learning is terrible. not very well structured. Beginners will soon feel lost with these official documents. Do you know any better resources to learn? I'm a java developer.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,

Qian Liu

[lutzh]

I hear Akka in Action https://www.manning.com/books/akka-in-action is pretty good. Apparently you can read the first 3 chapters for free if you sign up for the newsletter on the Lightbend website: https://www.lightbend.com/resources/e-books

Hope this helps,

Lutz

[Josep Prat]

Welcome to Akka!

As Lutz already said, I would recommend "Akka in Action". The only catch is that the code is mainly in Scala.

I have a question though, why do you say the official documentation is terrible? I personally find Akka docs quite good. What would you change/add to the current ones?

Best,

Josep

[Roland Kuhn]

While “terrible” is pretty strong wording I think it is fair to say that Akka has very good reference documentation but its initial learning experience can be improved. Would it help if some of the video courses were available (for free, of course) that were part of Principles of Reactive Programming?

Regards, Roland 

Sent from my iPhone

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[Josep Prat]

As former participant of that course, I think they would be a great addition to the current documentation assets. But I'm still interested in what the OP thinks it would improve a freshman experience.

Best,

Josep

[Mike Nielsen]

If I may be permitted to chime in here with my $0.02, some observations as an Akka bootstrapper:

Everybody has their own learning style -- some people I know can read even a fairly dense API spec and start writing code.  Personally, I need to get started on a problem-solving basis so in the early days:  I'm more of a monkey-see-monkey-do person, taking existing code and trying to shape it to fit my particular use-case. 

For learners like me some of the examples of code are a little terse -- they don't show enough context.  Looking at them in retrospect, they are adequate, but in prospect they can be a little obscure.  

While I haven't yet the skill to construct them myself (I'm an akka hobbyist, not a professional), what might be useful is to draw the code examples from a working code-base so they can be seen in the context of a project the student can build and run.  Many of the official Java tutorials do this reasonably well.  I know there are some good Activator samples available, but they don't correspond to the examples in the Akka documentation and their internal documentation can be rather sparse.  

The Activator samples, once you understand them, are very clever, but the cleverness can obscure the basics.  An analogy: I love a good proof in mathematics and can appreciate the elegance and beauty therein, but understanding a proof and gleaning generalizable skill from it can be two different things. What makes the proof a good learning tool (for people like me) is an explanation of the motivation and methods that went into its derivation.  Something similar for code samples would be very helpful.

Also, in some of the examples it can be a little hard to distinguish between those aspects of the code that are essential to the point being made and those that are not but nonetheless required to make compilable code -- detailed explanations of the examples would go a long way to enhancing their illustrative value.

I feel bad suggesting work for others to do, and my suggestions might be out of the scope of what's intended for the documentation, but I hope you can sympathize with my position: I'm not yet sufficiently knowledgable to be writing books or tutorials, and offer my comments in response to your interest in improving the Akka experience for novices.

Thank you for your patience in reading this.

Regards,

Mike

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[Qian Liu]

Thanks a lot for all the replies.. Since the documents should be good user manual but not purely documents for the developed technologies from the developers' perspectives. It could be good if the docs start by a "Get Started" section (including how to install, configure) to firstly make it runnable. Followed by a 

1) high level architecture/structure for the main classes/concepts or 

2) even the background knowledge for the programming model

would be necessary for a general user manual. not all the beginners have enough background to start using a new toolkit.

also, the manual should be third party libraries/tools independent, why should a new-comer for Akka know sbt and scala but not maven/gradle and python, etc(since you claim that Akka is also available for Java developers, not all java developers have the same tools in their toolboxes). The user manual should be completely independent from the usage of such tools which only brings the beginners difficulties to contextualize.

BTW, currently I'm using  "Akka in Action" and also "Applied Akka Patterns", especially the latter book, makes me get some feelings about Akka. Actually it's good to 

1) start from "Applied Akka Patterns", knowledge about Actor Models 

2) then combine with Akka official documents, "Akka in Action" and Akka API docs 

to learn Akka.

Best regards,

[Qing Zheng]

I totally agree with you. I am in the process of evaluating. Hazelcast and Akka. The documentation and code examples of Hazelcast is much better. I can quickly have a sense what I need to do if  I were to use Hazelcast. However it is not the case for Akka.  Don't get me wrong, I do like some of Akka's features. There are a lot of information,however, they are not presented in a useful way for a reader to quickly grasp what need to done. The sample examples are not that helpful either especially for java developers.

  Thanks

  Qing

[Patrik Nordwall]

Thanks for feedback. We are painfully aware of that the getting started experience is horrible. We are working on it since a few months back, but it takes a lot of times and there tend to be other things that get more attention. We'll continue the effort with writing a good getting started guide.

The reference documentation is also in need of improvements. Pull requests are very welcome at any time for improvements of things like typos, grammar, oversights, difficult language, unclear or wrong content. One thing we are doing is to convert it to Paradox (markdown) to make it easier for one-time contributors to help out with small improvements. It also needs structural improvements that must be done by the the core team. The asset is that it is rather complete and up to date, covering all features.

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Patrik Nordwall
Akka Tech Lead
Lightbend -  Reactive apps on the JVM
Twitter: @patriknw

[Rob Crawford]

The book "Akka Concurrency" is good -- it helped me with understanding some of the WHY of supervision, for example.

I saw a link earlier to a minimal project for a cluster application for scala -- would that kind of example, but for Java, help? I have some experiments I've written for Akka that I could pare down, but I can't swear they're best practices. I'd also have to get clearance from my employer, but I doubt they'd object, since I haven't convinced them to use Akka yet so there's no proprietary information in them.