The best way to learn Erlang

erlang

Other than specific projects (although those are welcome as well)…

What tools, books, articles, and other resources should I have at my desk to help me learn Erlang?

Also, are there mobile runtimes for Erlang?

Please point me in the right direction.

Note: yes, I have visited Erlang and Wikipedia, but I'd like to hear some reliable, experienced opinions.

Best Answer

I'm a month-or-so into learning and the guides I'm enjoying most are:

The Erlang Site's Getting Started with Erlang Guide
Joe Armstrong's Book Software for a Concurrent World (thoroughly recommended)
And I have on order: O'Reilly's Erlang Programming which has had some really positive reviews and sounds like a good companion to Joe Armstrong's book (covering many of the same topics in greater depth, possibly with more "real world" examples)

I think you can dive into the Getting Started guide straight away and it will certainly give you a feel for functional programming and then concurrency.

If you're in London this June there is the Erlang Factory conference which looks really good.

While I remember, these are two good presentations taking you through Erlang and it's uses:

Finally, you can follow my learning experiences on my blog (joelhughes.co.uk/blog) my step by step adjustment of FizzBuzz from python/ruby/php to Erlang might give you a good flavour (sorry about the shameless self promotion).

I have to say learning Erlang is currently one of my greatest pleasures, there is something very satisfying about it!

Related Solutions

Erlang written in

Erlang itself is written in Erlang. Sounds strange? Yes, because it is only partially true. OK look at it in more detail:

Erlang preprocessor is written in Erlang.
Erlang parser is written in Erlang.
Erlang compiler to BEAM (byte-code VM) is written in Erlang.
Erlang compiler to HiPE (native VM extension) is written in Erlang.
Erlang VM BEAM and HiPE is written mostly in C.
Linked-in drivers are written mostly in C. (They are plugged to VM and serves communication with outside world.)
OTP is written in Erlang.
Another ports or nodes can be written in any language.

What’s the best way to do something periodically in Erlang

Use timer:send_interval/2. E.g.:

-behavior(gen_server).

interval_milliseconds()-> 15000.
init()->
    timer:send_interval(interval_milliseconds(), interval),
    {ok, FascinatingStateData}.

%% this clause will be called every 15 seconds
handle_info(interval, StateData)->
    State2 = do_some_work(StateData)
    {noreply, State2}.

Best Answer

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Erlang written in

What’s the best way to do something periodically in Erlang

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