Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
Joe Armstrong
Pragmatic Bookshelf (11 Jul 2007)
ISBN 193435600X
ISBN 978-1934356005
536 pages
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Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
- Joe Armstrong Programming Erlang is an outstanding book. It's easy to read, interesting and, maybe, exciting too. The exposition is lucid, and exploits a practical, hands-on, example-driven approach throughout. I enjoyed reading this book totally. It interweaves working code with full, clear explanation, background and valuable insight. It felt like a breath of fresh air in software development material. Erlang and OTP are comparable to Java and core J2EE. Erlang/OTP is freely available, Open Source, software from Ericsson, the telecoms company. Erlang has several impressive attributes, but one is Ericssons claim it is used in telecom's hardware to deliver 99.9999999% (roughly 1 second in 30 years) availability, beating most Enterprise applications by a few 9's - that is quite impressive. The excellent roadmap in chapter 1 explains the books organisation and chunking of content; roughly: sequential programming, concurrent programming, distributed programming, interfacing, data storage, databases, OTP and multi-core programming. There is good depth to the content. The order of material can be a little strange, but if you are familiar with programming, it's likely straightforward. The book sets off at a good pace, quickly getting up and running with 'sequential Erlang'. Unlike many programming books, Armstrong deals with the practical nitty-gritty of downloading, installing, compiling, debugging and running Erlang on Mac, Linux and Windows. He returns to development practicalities at several points to support the increasing sophistication of applications. I felt that he really wants to make learning and applying Erlang straightforward, and he succeeded for me; everything worked 'silky smooth'. The sequential subset of Erlang is a dynamically-typed functional programming language with all of the usual bits, like: single assignment, pattern matching, list comprehensions, first class functions, exceptions, etc. In use, Erlang feels as much like strict Scheme, with helpful syntax, as statically-typed FP languages like Haskell, OCaml, or Standard ML. This is the sort of book that will not change you over night from a terrible programmer to a great hacker, but it will show you numerous ways to accomplish many excellent tasks using Erlang language. If you have good software development experience in other languages, Erlang will be easy to follow and grasp within days of picking up this book. I highly recommend it, infact, I have a copy myself and have no regrets :))Related Materials
The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages: Building Domain-specific Languages (Pragmatic Programmers) by Terence Parr. Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton. Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (International Computer Science Series) by Simon Thompson. Concurrent Programming in Erlang by J. L. Armstrong.Resources
About the Author
In his search to find better ways to implement fault-tolerant applications, Joe Armstrong designed and implemented the first version of Erlang in 1986. He wrote the first Erlang book and held the first Erlang course-he has worked with Erlang from the very beginning. He has taught Erlang to hundreds of programmers and held countless lectures and keynotes describing the technology. Joe has a PhD in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an expert in the construction of fault tolerant systems. Joe was the chief software architect of the project which produced the Erlang OTP system. He has worked as an entrepreneur in one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail) and has worked for 30 years in industry and research. Joe currently works for Ericsson AB where Erlang is used to build highly-fault tolerant switching systems.Latest Offers
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