What is the best way to learn Erlang?

Question

Other than specific projects (although those are welcome as well)...

What tools, books, articles, and other resources should I have at my desk to help me learn Erlang?

Also, are there mobile runtimes for Erlang?

Please point me in the right direction.

Note: yes, I have visited Erlang and Wikipedia, but I'd like to hear some reliable, experienced opinions.

Answer 1

I'm a month-or-so into learning and the guides I'm enjoying most are:

• The Erlang Site's Getting Started with Erlang Guide
• Joe Armstrong's Book Software for a Concurrent World (thoroughly recommended)
• And I have on order: O'Reilly's Erlang Programming which has had some really positive reviews and sounds like a good companion to Joe Armstrong's book (covering many of the same topics in greater depth, possibly with more "real world" examples)

I think you can dive into the Getting Started guide straight away and it will certainly give you a feel for functional programming and then concurrency.

If you're in London this June there is the Erlang Factory conference which looks really good.

While I remember, these are two good presentations taking you through Erlang and it's uses:

• Thinking in Erlang
• Functions + Messages + Concurrency = Erlang

Finally, you can follow my learning experiences on my blog (joelhughes.co.uk/blog) my step by step adjustment of FizzBuzz from python/ruby/php to Erlang might give you a good flavour (sorry about the shameless self promotion).

I have to say learning Erlang is currently one of my greatest pleasures, there is something very satisfying about it!

Answer 2

For beginners, the "Learn you some Erlang" guide is supremely awesome. It is as of yet incomplete, but provides a lot even with what little is there.

It also has an RSS so you can be informed when (if?) it is updated.

Answer 3

I found the best thing to do to learn erlang was reading joe's thesis http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf and then writing something I enjoyed, for me it was an iax2 server.

Answer 4

What I can recommend you is not to browse the Wings3d source code.

(I did it and it was a waste of time similar as when I tried to read the Quake2 sources :-p)

Answer 5

I have the both the Erlang Progamming and the Software for a Concurrent World, both are excellent. I might almost say the Erlang Programming is better, it shows a lot more about using OTP (Erlang libraries), but I was also a little more comfortable with the language when I was reading it, so that's what I was looking for.

The Getting Started with Erlang Guide is also pretty good.

Definitely you should give writing a simple server a try. That's one of the areas where Erlang really shines and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around message passing and the gen_server module.

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Also, you can run Erlang on ARM based mobile devices (ARMv5+) for sure, you could ask on erlang-questions for other architectures. Check out http://wiki.trapexit.org/index.php/Cross_compiling for the basics of getting started with cross-compiling.