Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide

Fred Hebert

language: English

Publisher: No Starch Press

Publishing date: Jan 18, 2013

Description:

Erlang is the language of choice for programmers who want to write robust, concurrent applications, but its strange syntax and functional design can intimidate the uninitiated. Luckily, there's a new weapon in the battle against Erlang-phobia: Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

Erlang maestro Fred Hebert starts slow and eases you into the basics: You'll learn about Erlang's unorthodox syntax, its data structures, its type system (or lack thereof!), and basic functional programming techniques. Once you've wrapped your head around the simple stuff, you'll tackle the real meat-and-potatoes of the language: concurrency, distributed computing, hot code loading, and all the other dark magic that makes Erlang such a hot topic among today's savvy developers.

As you dive into Erlang's functional fantasy world, you'll learn about:

  • Testing your applications with EUnit and Common Test
  • Building and releasing your applications with the OTP framework
  • Passing messages, raising errors, and starting/stopping processes over many nodes
  • Storing and retrieving data using Mnesia and ETS
  • Network programming with TCP, UDP, and the inet module
  • The simple joys and potential pitfalls of writing distributed, concurrent applications

Packed with lighthearted illustrations and just the right mix of offbeat and practical example programs, Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! is the perfect entry point into the sometimes-crazy, always-thrilling world of Erlang.

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Amazon.com Review

An Excerpt from the Foreword

I hope that many of you will enjoy reading Fred’s book as much as I did and that you find learning Erlang to be an agreeable and thought-provoking process. If you type in the programs in this book and run them as you go along, you’ll learn even more. Writing programs is much more difficult than reading them, and the first step is just letting your fingers get used to typing in the programs and getting rid of the small syntax errors that inevitably occur. As you get deeper into the book, you’ll be writing programs that are pretty tricky to write in most other languages-- but hopefully you won’t realize this. Soon you’ll be writing distributed programs. This is when the fun starts...

Thanks, Fred, for a great book.

-Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang

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About the Author

Fred Hebert is a self-taught programmer who used to teach Erlang. He is currently working on a real-time bidding platform and was named Erlang User of the Year 2012. His online tutorial, Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!, is widely regarded as the best way to learn Erlang.