Programming Erlang Software for a Concurrent World

Author: Joe Armstrong Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2007 Pages: 536 ISBN: 978-1934356005 Aimed at: Beginners in concurrent processing Rating: 4 Pros: A gentle introduction with convincing examples Cons: Rather slow paced Reviewed by: Mike James Have you heard of Erlang?  If you have you probably don’t need to buy this book. It’s a fairly low level introduction to an important parallel processing language. It starts off by introducing Erlang as if it was just any old sequential processing language. We have to wait until Chapter Seven for a slow and gentle paced introduction to the concurrent aspects of the language. The book is peppered with real world examples that are sufficiently small and encapsulated to be understandable and to convince the reader that Erlang is a language that is practical and usable. There are some organisational problems that could be sorted out in a second edition but overall the book is quite good and provides an introduction to a high-level concurrent language that might just be the solution we are looking for. Download the language, try it out and if you need more help buy a copy of this book as it is currently the best introductory text on offer.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 05 August 2009 )