Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

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 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

Average Customer Rating:

The K&R of the Erlang world

Customer Rating:

I found this to be a pretty easy read overall, but of course had to re-read some sections as I was coming across new concepts. It reminded me a lot of reading Kernighan and Ritchie way back when I was learning C. I don't say that because the author is the "father" of the language, but because it covers the bare essentials, just enough for you to start really learning to use it. So if you want to start learning Erlang then this is essential reading and will give you a good start. If you want advance then you'll either have read the online documentation (and there's lots of it) or wait for a book that covers things in more depth. Highly recommended.

Great overview on Erlang and OTP	Customer Rating:
With a very amenable writing, Joe Armstrong presents a clear overview on the Erlang Language and basics of the OTP. The book presents the basic topics, with simple and yet powerful examples, and points the directions on how to find more informations. Definitely a great book.

Very good intro to Erlang	Customer Rating:
This book was well worth the money even if you don't intend to program in Erlang. It gives a very good over view of an alternative model of parallel programming that is currently not heavily used. The model emphasizes reliability by not having any shared state. I went on to use this model in C++ projects.

Good book technically; a bit confusing organizationally.

Customer Rating:

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

Customer Rating:

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!