This book is an in-depth introduction to Erlang, a programming language ideal for any situation where concurrency, fault tolerance, and fast response is essential. Erlang is gaining widespread adoption with the advent of multi-core processors and their new scalable approach to concurrency. With this guide you'll learn how to write complex concurrent programs in Erlang, regardless of your programming background or experience.
Written by leaders of the international Erlang community -- and based on their training material --
Erlang Programming focuses on the language's syntax and semantics, and explains pattern matching, proper lists, recursion, debugging, networking, and concurrency.
This book helps you:
- Understand the strengths of Erlang and why its designers included specific features
- Learn the concepts behind concurrency and Erlang's way of handling it
- Write efficient Erlang programs while keeping code neat and readable
- Discover how Erlang fills the requirements for distributed systems
- Add simple graphical user interfaces with little effort
- Learn Erlang's tracing mechanisms for debugging concurrent and distributed systems
- Use the built-in Mnesia database and other table storage features
Erlang Programming provides exercises at the end of each chapter and simple examples throughout the book.
Francesco Cesarini has used Erlang on a daily basis for over 15 years, having started his career as an intern at Ericsson's computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson's Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of the OTP middleware, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecom applications.
In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Solutions. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training, systems development, support services and conferences. At Erlang Solutions, Francesco has worked on major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and in his current role as Technical Director, is setting the strategy and vision of the company while supervising the technical teams.
Francesco is active in the Erlang community not only through regularly talks, seminars and tutorials at conferences worldwide, but also through his involvement in international research projects. With whatever time he has left over, he teaches Erlang to graduates and undergraduates at Oxford University and the IT University of Gothenburg. You can follow his ramblings (mainly on Erlang and Erlang Solutions) on twitter.
