Content overview

• Chapter 1 "Concurrency Everywhere," gives an overview of actor-based concurrency as well as the reasoning, and history, behind it.
  
  
• Chapter 2 "Messages All the Way Up," birds-eye view of the actor programming model refers to features that Scala actors already implement and when relevant, points out differences between Scala actors and the more general model.
  
  
• Chapter 3 "Scala's Language Support for Actors," reviews the Scala features most relevant to actors for the Java developer who has little or no experience with Scala.
  
  
• Chapter 4 "Actor Chat," illustrates the key elements of Scala's actor DSL with a quintessential messaging application: a chat program.
  
  
• Chapter 5 "Event-Based Programming," covers event-based actors which are implemented as event handlers and are more lightweight than their thread-based cousins. This chapter discusses thread pools as an execution environment for event-based actors, as well as event-based futures.
  
  
• Chapter 6 "Exceptions, Actor Termination, and Shutdown," covers how to handle errors in concurrent, actor-based programs - handling exceptions, monitoring other actors to detect termination, and termination management of actor-based programs.
  
  
• Chapter 7 "Customizing Actor Execution," shows you how to customize the runtime system, improve the integration with threads and thread-local data, simplify testing, and more.
  
  
• Chapter 8 "Remote Actors," explains the constructs involved in using remote actors, revisits the chat example application from Chapter 4. You will learn how to create remote actors and how to address and communicate between remote actors.
  
  
• Chapter 9 "Distributed and Parallel Computing," illustrates how to accomplish some common parallel and distributed computing tasks with actors focusing on two patterns, MapReduce and reliable broadcasting.
  
  
• Chapter 10 "Akka," introduces the essentials of Akka from a user's perspective and explains the main differences to Scala actors, from an operational point of view.
  
  
• Chapter 11 "API Overview," provides a detailed API overview of the scala.actors package in Scala 2.8 and Scala 2.9. The organization follows groups of types that logically belong together as well as the trait hierarchy.