Book Review RabbitMQ Essentials

I've had a chance to read through the book "RabbitMQ Essentials" published by Packtpub.com

This book is an excellent book for those who is thinking about integrating their software architect with RabbitMQ. The book is using an Application Inbox to step by step walk you through different technical decision to design and build an Inbox using RabbitMQ. Well, I personally wouldn't build an Inbox application using RabbitMQ because I think RabbitMQ is not a database, messages suppose to be consumed as fast as possible and shouldn't be queued up. Another debate is that it would require you to have each queue for each users which is not ideal to me. The book mentioned we can create thousand of queues without any problem, I wouldn't say yes or say no to that claim because I've never tried it but I wouldn't try to do that to my solution if I have other approach. I've been experimenting enough problem from RabbitMQ cluster network partitioning that made me to rebuild the cluster from scratch. Having thousand queues to backup and restore when disaster happen is possibly a pain. However, I think the application example in this book is fine and a perfect example to help someone who has never used RabbitMQ to look into messaging world. I strongly think you would learn all the skills you need to work with RabbitMQ from basic knowledge such as Exchange, Queue and Binding to setting up a HA cluster or using federation.

In some beginning chapters, It was very interesting to know why RabbitMQ hasn't supported latest AMQP standard and I completely agree with that. I would expect to read more about RabbitMQ ops in later chapters such as trouble shooting network partition, or ideal cluster set-up depend on hosting environments but It's not there in the book. Anyway, here is a brief table of contents:

• Chapter 1. A Rabbit Spring to Life
• Chapter 2. Creating an Application Inbox
• Chapter 3. Switching to Server-push
• Chapter 4. Handling Application Logs
• Chapter 5. Tweaking Message Delivery
• Chapter 6. Smart Message Routing
• Chapter 7. Taking RabbitMQ to Production
• Chapter 8. Testing and Tracing Applications

In summary, If you are about to learn RabbitMQ, you should read it. It's short enough for you to read on the train but still cover all important aspect. If you are using RabbitMQ but still want to reinforce your knowledge about RabbitMQ, you should also read it. The only thing I think the book doesn't have is more real-life production experiences from people. But I'm sure we can always find it from online community.

Cheers