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Jason and Alvaro's excellent Rabbit book

· 3 min read
Alexis Richardson

Here at Rabbit HQ we've been enjoying "RabbitMQ in Action", the introduction to RabbitMQ and messaging.  Part of the Manning series, the book is written by Jason Williams and Alvaro Videla, both well known for their many contributions to the Rabbit community.

Today we'd like to say thank-you to Jason and Alvaro.  Thank-you Jason and Alvaro!  You did an amazing job and infinite beers are on us.

But there's more...  Manning have kindly offered a promotional discount of 37% to readers of this blog.  All is revealed below, in a guest post by Jason Williams himself...

RabbitMQ in Action is here

Well, it's finally here. After 18 months of writing, re-writing and updating, RabbitMQ in Action is finished and in the flesh. It's hard to believe that when we started, RabbitMQ was at version 1.8.0 and now we're at 2.8.2. So much has changed in Rabbit that required rewrites of whole sections along the way, that it feels like we're really at 5 or 6.0. It's a testament to the Rabbit team members that helped us that the book kept pace with it all. So now that it's out why should you read it (besides the 37% discount code below)?

If you feel like you want a deeper understanding than the online tutorials offer, we wrote this for you. Whether it's figuring out clustering and mirrored queues, or just getting a better understanding of messaging fabrics (queues, bindings and routing exchanges, relays and federations.), our goal was to write the book we wished had existed when we started, and that we hope will help you. From the management console and API to building real world applications and plugins, we've tried to cover everything you need to get a good foundation of Rabbit under your belt and hopefully that you can use as a desk reference too.

Lots of example code on Github to get you started

One thing we tried to focus on was using RabbitMQ to link together different applications written in completely different languages.  That's one of the main reasons we wrote the examples in Python and PHP. However, we had two other reasons also:

1.) Python reads almost like pseudo-code and produces incredibly readable programs which makes it an excellent teaching language. You can focus on what the example program's doing, without a lot of class declarations and boiler plate clouding up the works.

2.) There are a ton of books on messaging targeted at Java and the old-line enterprise brokers. We wanted to write something different... something that was easier to read and more accessible to people without any background in messaging. RabbitMQ in Action is very much a book for people of all languages and backgrounds. Writing in Python and PHP helped us do that (there's appendices on using Rabbit with Java and .NET too).

With that last one in mind, we've done something a little different than other Manning books all of our examples are in a public repo on Github.

We did this so that if you feel like converting the examples into the language of your choice to help those like you, you can. As long as the license on your contribution is BSD, we'll merge in your pull requests and hopefully build a huge library of RabbitMQ examples that can help everyone. There are already Ruby versions of the examples merged in!

So if those aren't reasons enough to give RabbitMQ in Action a shot how about a 37% discount just because you read this blog? :)

Save 37% on RabbitMQ in Action with Promotional Discount Code 12rmqb when you checkout at the Manning web site.