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

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.

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

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Starting Out
Chapter 2: Modules
Chapter 3: Syntax in Functions
Chapter 4: Types (or Lack Thereof)
Chapter 5: Hello Recursion!
Chapter 6: Higher-Order Functions
Chapter 7: Errors and Exceptions
Chapter 8: Functionally Solving Problems
Chapter 9: A Short Visit to Common Data Structures
Chapter 10: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Concurrency
Chapter 11: More on Multiprocessing
Chapter 12: Errors and Processes
Chapter 13: Designing a Concurrent Application
Chapter 14: An Introduction to OTP
Chapter 15: Rage Against the Finite-State Machines
Chapter 16: Event Handlers
Chapter 17: Who Supervises the Supervisors?
Chapter 18: Building an Application
Chapter 19: Building Applications the OTP Way
Chapter 20: The Count of Applications
Chapter 21: Release Is the Word
Chapter 22: Leveling Up in the Process Quest
Chapter 23: Buckets of Sockets
Chapter 24: EUnited Nations Council
Chapter 25: Bears, ETS, Beets: In-Memory NoSQL for Free!
Chapter 26: Distribunomicon
Chapter 27: Distributed OTP Applications
Chapter 28: Common Test for Uncommon Tests
Chapter 29: Mnesia and the Art of Remembering
Chapter 30: Type Specifications and Dialyzer