This year I’ve attended Principles of Reactive Programming course. It wasn’t easy one, at least for me.

I mean, first two weeks driven by Martin were clear and straightforward. Even first Erik’s week about Future was approachable. The rest -rxScala with it’s Observables and actor model with Akka was rather hard and required a lot of work. My conclusion: akka isn’t easy concept (contrary to all akka guides saying it is) maybe it’s easier to debug when things go bad comparing to standard java locking/synchronisation model but for designing it requires a lot of time and hard work to acquire that way of thinking.
Except videos on course pages I red other helpful materials like:

  1. Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala book by Aleksandar Prokopec
  2. The Neophyte’s Guide to Scala

and two cheet sheets dedicated for this course

  1. by sjuvekar
  2. by dnvriend

And good akka tutorials

  1. Concurrency and Fault Tolerance Made Easy: An Akka Tutorial with Examples by Diego Castorina
  2. Reactive twitter app with akka by Jan Machacek
  3. Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Akka by Adam Warski – video

Maybe someday that materials would help you.