[erlang-questions] Erlang book now shipping

[Joe Armstrong]

My original chapter plan was a lot more ambitious - at one stage I
thought about calling this "volume 1" I certainly have enough material
for a second volume ;

What I would like to encourage are other people to write Erlang books,
especially
covering the applications.

Assuming a ruby-like spreading model about one year from now we might
see a new wave of Erlang applications.

The book introduces a new audience to Erlang.

It takes six moths to read the book and get proficient

Six moths to write a decent app and get it spread.

Things like "Erlang on rails" should therefore come out in about a year.

So please, guy, get your pens out - there are books to be written

   - yaws
   - ejabberd
  - mnesia

BTW - I see this as part of a "new wave" Erlang will not succeed on it's own -
people have to invest a significant amount of effort in learning FP - if this
can be amortized over several languages then things become a lot easier.

I see Erlang + Haskell + OCaml as a collection of languages with similar roots.
They are all based on the lambda calculus and don't have mutable data. This way
of thinking is strange at first - since you have to learn to program
without side-effects
(or at least with minimal side effects) - these three languages differ
in interpretation
(strong/dynamic types) (lazy/eager evaluation) but lambda calculus is
not about types
or evaluation strategies.

An erlang book all by itself in a bookshop will get rather lonely.

I want to see an entire shelf full of Erlang/Haskell/OCaml books *and
their applications*
Only then will we have a realistic alternative to Java/C++/C# or
python/ruby/perl

If we want to challenge OOPs then it must be through the concerted efforts of an
entire school of languages.

So Guys - sharpen your pencils!

/Joe


On 7/20/07, Ben Hood <0x6e6562@REDACTED> wrote:
> Great book, Joe, really well written and to the point......are there
> any plans to write a book about advanced Erlang topics (nothing in
> particular, but something that assumes prior experience with Erlang,
> or maybe something about how not to code in Erlang )?
>
> Ben
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