Update: unfortunately, the Safari Books blog no longer seems to be around, so the following links are all pointed at their Archive.org copies. Recently I was asked to write a few posts for the Safari Books Online blog. They were looking for Scala content, so I suggested Akka as a central theme. I wrote these posts with an audience in mind that hopefully would have been exposed to Scala (or could, at least, read a short Scala tutorial), but who had not yet written any Akka code.