Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World | 
 enlarge | Author: Joe Armstrong
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Category: Book
List Price: $36.95
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 21807
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 536
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.6 x 1
ISBN: 193435600X
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9781934356005
ASIN: 193435600X
Publication Date: July 11, 2007
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Product Description
Erlang solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems. It's used worldwide by companies who need to produce reliable, efficient, and scalable applications. Invest in learning Erlang now. Moore's Law is the observation that the amount you can do on a single chip doubles every two years. But Moore's Law is taking a detour. Rather than producing faster and faster processors, companies such as Intel and AMD are producing multi-core devices: single chips containing two, four, or more processors. If your programs aren't concurrent, they'll only run on a single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow. Erlang is a programming language designed for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for many years to build massive fault-tolerated systems that run for years with minimal failures. Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers: this means your Erlang program should run a lot faster on a 4 core processor than on a single core processor, all without you having to change a line of code. Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems to make a powerful language for building the massively parallel, networked applications of the future. This book presents Erlang and functional programming in the familiar Pragmatic style. And it's written by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang. It includes example code you'll be able to build upon. In addition, the book contains the full source code for two interesting applications: A SHOUTcast server which you can use to stream music to every computer in your house, and a full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of data. Learn how to write programs that run on dozens or even hundreds of local and remote processors. See how to write robust applications that run even in the face of network and hardware failure, using the Erlang programming language.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Good book technically; a bit confusing organizationally. August 5, 2008
David Berube
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Overall, I liked this book. When I read this, I was looking at doing some Erlang work; I didn't end up using Erlang, but the book was still enjoyable, and gave me a good overview of the language.
Some things were a bit odd: the organization was not clear, and the order of chapters was confusing. The authors choice of material was seemed unusual to me: he covered a streaming MP3 server, and mentions ID3 tags; he does not, however, describe what they are or describe in detail how his code processes them. Still, the important details of Erlang itself are covered, and perhaps that's the most important part.
Take it easy,
Dave
 Very easy to digest June 22, 2008
Mark Twain
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I made an attempt at working through this book 6 months ago and didn't feel quite comfortable so I dropped it and instead pursued Programming in Haskell. Yesterday I decided to get back into Erlang and found it a complete breeze, powering through the entire book in a few hours.
A lot of things seem to become really easy after working with Haskell, not to say that programming in Haskell is hard, just it twists and bends your mind into a different shape.
Now that I'm abreast of the material covered in this book, I am leaping into a large project with great confidence.
5/5, excellent book!
Necessary book, but needs a 2nd edition March 5, 2008
Christian J. Convey (Wakefiled, RI United States)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've been working through this book and am very glad for it. I'm not sure how else I'd efficiently have gotten up to speed on Erlang.
The book does need lots of minor work, though - it still feels like a beta piece of software. There are examples / explanations that make use of not-yet (or never) explained functions/modules. The appendix describing some of Erlang's modules only claims that the set of documented modules is incomplete, but doesn't mention that the set of functions within some modules is also incomplete. Etc.
Another issue is the license of the code examples. The author shows some example code for how to do certain things, such as a distributed map function (pmap). After reading the book, it's hard (at least for a newbie) to imagine a different solution than the author's. But if you go to the website containing the example code from the book, you find a pretty restrictive license on the example code. So this leaves the reader in a difficult position: the book only shows you one way to do something like pmap, and the author has a license on that code that makes it unusable to many readers. This is more than a little frustrating.
Finally, the index is very incomplete.
If you're new to Erlang you still want this book. But it would really be a good thing for the author to gather criticism (if he hasn't already) and go a second round.
An excellent book February 6, 2008
Nick Gerakines (San Francisco, CA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was recommended by a colleague and I was hesitant at first, but it really is an excellent read.
After flipping through the first few chapters, taking in the examples and absorbing what it was spelling out, it really altered the way that I fundamentally look at software modeling. Joe Armstrong's style of teaching by example and breaking things down into the smallest possible space makes this book worthwhile.
 Are you already familiar with functional programming? January 30, 2008
J. Pease (Odessa, TX United States)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Erlang really appears to be an interesting language, and the author's enthusiasm for the subject shows - which is good. It helped me to keep going, when at times the code was a little hard to follow.
The book does a good job of introducing the language. In particular later chapters give emphasis to the topics of concurrency through multiple processes, multi-cores and distributed programs. All very timely subjects for a world that is connected to the Internet, and where even laptops have multi-core processors
I gave the book a 4 star rating because I feel the author somewhat forgot who his audience is.
On page 5 he starts out with a description that fit me almost perfectly, and probably many other readers: "Once upon a time a programmer came across a book describing a funny programming language. It had an unfamiliar syntax [...] it wasn't even object-oriented. The programs were, well, different....Not only were the programs different, but the whole approach to programming was different."
After reading the book I don't feel like the "Erlang Master" that the road map described (pg 9). While the syntax is now familiar, I still look at the Erlang code and it feels foreign. I still have to "decipher" the code instead of read it.
I would have liked the book to more fully address the items from the "Once upon a time" paragraphs. Being that "the whole approach to programming" is different than the OO that many readers are used to, I would have liked to have seen a chapter (or three) on how to best get into that mode of thinking.
I do think the book is a good jumping off point. It gives you more than enough to get started.
However, if you are unfamiliar with languages where functions accept functions which also accept functions as parameters and return another function as a result, you may end up feeling (as I did) that you only have half the puzzle.
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