Erlang Book - again

[Simon Chappell]

On 8/29/06, Joe Armstrong (TN/EAB) <joe.armstrong@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> I don't think PH could be forced to do this - persuaded perhaps - forced no.
>
> I'll write and ask them.

Always worth a try. :-)

> The book is however sadly out of date.
>
> For those who are interested I have started writing a new book.

Woo hoo! Christmas is coming early this year.

> It has proved to be difficult to find a publisher so I will be using a print
> on demand service to print the book.

Please let us know how this works for you. Have you decided which one
yet? I've heard good things about lulu.com, but I've never tried it.

> I hope you'll all buy it. If you want any particular material covering send
> me a mail.

A few starters:

* Remember us command-line folks. Almost every example or tutorial
that I've seen has assumed that you were already at an "erl" prompt.
Fine, but some of us like to run our code from the command-line like
God intended. :-)

* A chapter or two (or appendix) on transitioning from procedural
languages would be wonderful. I'm completely sold on the idea of
Erlang, but I keep getting hung up on the differences. For Erlang to
make a dent in the mainstream, you've gotta help us poor procedural
types make the leap to functional and concurrent programming. Loops
especially. Ok, I *know* that loops = tail-recursion, but give us some
solid steps on how to change our Java loops to tail-recursion.

* How to extend our installation of Erlang with goodies from the
Jungeral et al. What is the Erlang way to add libraries? In the Java
world we add it to the CLASSPATH. How do you do it?

* How do I test? I'm a big time user of JUnit in the Java world. How
do I do that in Erlang-space?

* Building and packaging. How? With what? What is the Erlang
equivalent of Ant? Make? "Ent"?

* Examples of the stuff that people really do: file handling, socket
handling, working with *spit* XML *spit*.

How's that for a start? :-)

Simon

-- 
www.simonpeter.org