If this blog has been unusually quiet over the last few months, it is with good reason – I wrote another book! Understanding Message Brokers has just been released for FREE download by O’Reilly. It is a 70 page concentrated brain dump of how to reason about messaging, based on a presentation I gave at a number of conferences around Europe last year – The Myth of The Magical Messaging Fabric.
The book is in O’Reilly’s report format, and takes about a weekend to read through – perfect for the busy developer, architect, or CTO.
It takes you through two different messaging products – ActiveMQ and Kafka – to not just explain how these technologies work, but also to give you a sense of the decisions their authors made and the constraints that they were working with. The idea is that not only will you walk away with a better understanding of these products, but you will know what to look at the next time you approach any messaging technology. As a bonus, I included a chapter about some of the key patterns used to build reliable messaging applications, because it’s not just a case of having great tools – you have to know how to use them.
The book will also be available in paper form at O’Reilly conferences.
Enjoy!