Beyond This Book

This section will help you get a better overview of the Scala ecosystem and help guide your self-study after the book has ended, so you can continue to improve your Scala skills.

Various Scala Libraries

The purpose of this topic is to briefly introduce a couple of different Scala libraries for solving problems in different domains so that you can study the ones that are interesting to you after the book.

Akka

The first library we'll look at is one of the most popular libraries in the Scala ecosystem. It has been around for a long time—the first public release of the library was in 2010—and it's used in production by a large number of big organizations.

Its main abstractions are Actor and Streams:

• Actors are a way to model concurrency without resorting to locks. You might have heard about them before if you've read about the programming language Erlang. An Actor is an entity that can receive and react to messages, spawn new actors, and send messages...