Canonical pattern reference in Actors programming model

Question

Is there a source, which I could use to learn some of the most used and popular practices regarding Actor-/Agent-oriented programming? My primary concern is about parallelism and distribution limited to the mentioned scheme - Actors, message passing.

Should I begin with Erlang documentation or maybe there is any kind of book that describes the most important building blocks when programming Actor-oriented?

(Most useful examples would be in Scala or F#)

Answer 1

The Erlang and Scala's Akka are most popular and have large community. In case you want to know ML-based style there is JoCaml. They have simple intro text and collection of more formal papers. I'm using JoCaml about two years in my research work and very happy with it. Also, you can find many examples of the F# mailboxes usage to implement actor-style message passing.

Answer 2

For a colorful and interesting explanation I'd recommend to read some entries on this blog

Other than that, we welcome you to the Akka mailinglist!