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TL;DR
> I didn't like this book. If you're looking for a good book in almost the same topic checkout www.goodreads.com/book/show/23463279-designing-data-intensive-applications

In General didn't like this book. While the topic is great, the material was not that great. I expected more that this from the author. Basically this book is not about reactive design patters, it's about selling Akka.

Pros: The subject of the book is cool and quite popular.

Cons:
By reading this book you're going to feel that actor model is the ultimate answer to everything. ( which is wrong btw). There are more that one correct way to solve distributed systems problems and different paradigms exist to solve different set of problems.

The author is not honest with cons of actor model or solutions which he provides.

If you know about distributed systems or big data you can safely ignore about 60% of the book.

There are lots of situations which author compares oranges with apples in this book. In some cases he even compare orange with a shoe. Lots of uneven, unrealistic comparisons of tools with different purposes. For example comparing Actor model to promises for distributed systems is totally wrong.
Most of the comparisons of this book is in favor of actor model by ignoring the fact that other tools and paradigms might have different and specific existence goals. Or comparing NodeJS ( I'm not a fan ) with Erlang/OTP and Scala/Akka for location transparency is wrong ( Ignoring the goals of the tool and language )

There are lots of cases like "X is not good at doing Y" with no reference to prove it at all. In general author didn't provide enough references for most of dropped facts.

Author constantly keep talking about what they did in Akka ( Apparently he is part of the team ).
Which is not related to the book title.

* The last one is a little bit picky and harsh but author uses "you" when ever he wants do declare some wrong decision and "we" otherwise. Like: "If you want to design X you might use...." and it leads to a bad thing or "We designed X like ....." which leads to a good thing. In general i didn't felt good when I was reading this book.