Synopses & Reviews
If youre new to Erlang, its functional style can seem difficult, but with help from this hands-on introduction, youll 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. Youll 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, youll understand why Erlang is ideal for concurrency and resilience.
- Get cozy with Erlangs shell, its command line interface
- Become familiar with Erlangs 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, Erlangs open source libraries and tools
Synopsis
Erlang gives developers incredibly powerful tools for concurrency and resilience, but applying those tools requires learning the functional programming approaches that help Erlang isolate its processes.
Introducing Erlang gives readers a gentle introduction to this powerful and reliable language. Examples demonstrate how to make Erlang work on its own terms, rather than attempting to translate from other languages. Examples will demonstrate one skill at a time, advancing readers through basic sequential programming through higher-order functions, list comprehensions, processes, debugging, data storage, and a brief introduction to OTP.
About the Author
Simon St. Laurent is Senior Editor at O'Reilly Media, Inc., focusing primarily on JavaScript and web-related projects. He co-chairs OSCON and the Fluent conference. He's authored or co-authored books including Introducing Erlang, Learning Rails 3, XML Pocket Reference, 3rd, XML: A Primer, and Cookies.
You can find more of his writing on technology, Quakerism, and the Town of Dryden at simonstl.com.
Table of Contents
Preface; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Chapter 1: Chapter Title;