3. Tutorials

3.1 The Basics

If you are new to agent programming, read Designing Agent Programs in ASTRA in ASTRA Concepts first: it builds on the light switch example to show how to design an agent’s beliefs, goals and plans.

Further topics are covered in ASTRA Concepts, including the Practical Reasoning Programming Style, a systematic way of organising an agent’s plans; Agent Communication, which explains FIPA ACL messages; and Interaction Protocols, which structure conversations between agents.

The guides below provide some basic techniques for writing ASTRA programs. Explanations are based on Maven command line tools, but you should be able to adapt these if you complete the relevant IDE guide in Getting Started.

• Building & Deploying ASTRA Programs

• Creating Multiple Agents with ASTRA

• Multi-Agent Communication with ASTRA

• Working with Lists

3.2 ASTRA By Example

This part of the guide presents a series of simple programs that illustrate how various language features are implemented.

• Basic ASTRA

• Distributed Systems Examples

3.3 Video Tutorial

The YouTube video below provides a basic introduction to programming with ASTRA.

3.4 Going Further

Once you are comfortable with the basics, Section 4: Modules and APIs describes the library of modules that comes with ASTRA and explains how to write your own modules, link agents to EIS environments, and manage Docker deployments.