Erlang Programming

This book intends to be a little guide about how to be the Erlang medic in a time of war. It is first and foremost a collection of tips and tricks to help understand where failures come from, and a dictionary of different code snippets and practices that helped developers debug production systems that were built in Erlang.

If you're new to Erlang, its functional style can seem difficult, but with help from this hands-on introduction, you’ll scale the learning curve and discover how enjoyable, powerful, and fun this language can be.

Erlang is an important programming language especially in light of its functional paradigm, excellent handling of concurrency, ability to deal with distributed and multi-core platforms, reliability and fault-tolerance. It is also a difficult language with an unconventional (Prolog-like) syntax, lack of object orientation, and importantly the nonexistence of variables.

Erlang is a concurrent, functional programming language designed for programming large industrial real time systems. The language is untyped and has a pattern matching syntax. Functions are written as a set of recursion equations and the language has explicit concurrency and asynchronous message passing. Written in a tutorial style, the emphasis is on learning through example and a number of well known problems in designing and programming concurrent fault-tolerant real-time systems are illstrated.New chapters on Distributed Programming, Distributed Programming Techniques and Distributed Data.

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.