Lynton Grice said
Having already read the very good Erlang book by Joe Armstrong entitled "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World", I was very excited to get this new Erlang book the moment it became available.
I am fairly new to Erlang and unfortunately do not use it in my daily job (SAP technical consultant by day) so I can only give a "beginners viewpoint". Not taking anything away from Joe Armstrongs book at all...it is also superb, but from a beginners point of view I have found that "Erlang Programming" is an easier read and I'm doing more "oh, is that how it works" now ;-) I especially enjoy the little diagrams scattered around the book to help illustrate how the processes communicate etc.
The chapters I have found most useful to me are:
- Process Design Patterns (I enjoyed reading on the "Finite State Machine etc")
- Process Error Handling
- Distributed Programming in Erlang
Overall I am VERY impressed with this book and would happily recommend it to anyone like me who is trying to get up to speed with Erlang very quickly.
BTW: The 2 books combined definetly compliment each other very nicely!
Thankyou Simon and Francesco for an OUTSTANDING book!!
Alexey Romanov said
This book is a well-written and comprehensive introduction to the Erlang programming language, which is very well-suited for distributed systems which need to be scalable and robust (and concurrent programming in general). Erlang is used by Ericsson (where it originates), Motorola, Amazon, IMDB, Facebook, etc.
Each chapter is followed by useful exercises. Since calvinmme's review already lists all chapters, I'll simply mention what this book covers that Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World doesn't:
1. Unit testing with EUnit.
2. Types. (Armstrong's book includes them in a short appendix, and doesn't tell you how to actually work with EDoc or Dyalyzer. Imagine a Java introduction book which doesn't cover Javadoc!)
3. GUI programming with wxErlang.
4. Interfacing not only with C programs, but Java, Ruby, and Unix shells as well. Linked-in drivers are not covered, which I consider a good thing: they are only needed by Erlang and C specialists.
5. Debugging and tracing (again relegated to an appendix by Armstrong).
If you prefer ebooks, as I do, note that this book is available from O'Reilly without DRM.
Dmitrii Dimandt aka Mamut said
This is an incredibly amazing book. The language is clear and concise, but not to the point of obscurity. The book does a marvellous job of describing not only the "beginner" aspects of the language, but also more advanced topics, such as behaviours and interfacing with other languages.
One of the greatest parts this book has to offer is an entire chapter devoted to debugging and tracing.
All in all, the book offers a wealth of information to both beginners and more experienced developers.
orangekay said
I too found this book easier to read than Joe's, and its information invaluable, but I don't understand O'Reilly's pricing decisions at all. This title is not particularly lengthy for a book of its type, there are very few illustrations and the paper is nearly as flimsy as newsprint. I've found it will actually crinkle itself up while sitting on your desk as the ambient humidity fluctuates. This obviously shouldn't dissuade anyone who actually needs the book's information from purchasing it, but I really wish O'Reilly would stop gouging us this heavily just because they don't shift as many units as Dean Koontz. Here's hoping they can iron out their differences with the Kindle people soon.
Mark Atwood said
I am currently in the process of learning Erlang for a personal project. These books both measures up to the high expectations I have come to expect from OReilly.
Erlang is a difficult language to "sell", and is a challenge to learn.
This book assumes you have decently good programming skills, and don't need your hand held too much about the idea of programming, and instead show you how Erlang is different, it's unique and interesting features, and some of "how to think in Erlang".
I wish there was more on "how to think in Erlang", especially since most programmer's intuitions about multiprocessing and concurrency, born of battle scars with multithreaded programming in C/C++, will be wrong.
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