Introducing Erlang: Getting Started in Functional Programming

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.

Author Simon St. Laurent shows you how to write simple Erlang programs by teaching you one basic skill at a time. You’ll learn about pattern matching, recursion, message passing, process-oriented programming, and establishing pathways for data rather than telling it where to go. By the end of your journey, you’ll understand why Erlang is ideal for concurrency and resilience.

Get cozy with Erlang’s shell, its command line interface Become familiar with Erlang’s basic structures by working with numbers Discover atoms, pattern matching, and guards: the foundations of your program structure Delve into the heart of Erlang processing with recursion, strings, lists, and higher-order functions Create processes, send messages among them, and apply pattern matching to incoming messages Store and manipulate structured data with Erlang Term Storage and the Mnesia database Learn about Open Telecom Platform, Erlang’s open source libraries and tools

Simon St. Laurent is a web developer, network administrator, computer book author, and XML troublemaker living in Ithaca, NY. His books include XML: A Primer, XML Elements of Style, Building XML Applications, Cookies, and Sharing Bandwidth. He is a contributing editor to XMLhack.com and an occasional contributor to XML.com.