wonderings

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

>I'd love to be able to buy a really neat, well-written book about more 
>advanced Erlang topics. I'd also love to get a monthly
newsletter-style thing with nice Erlang ideas

That was more or less what I had in mind too... Once the language is 
learned, one wants to see more ways to use it in day-by-day applications.

>I'm not so sure that a book about OTP would be that great a
success---the OTP books are actually quite good

Yes, they are - as a reference. But for me reading reference documentation 
doesn't work half as good as reading/testing hands-on examples. There are 
also "hidden" problems and issues that only come up when working with an 
application - see Mnesia and JInterface for example.

>e.g. a satellite control system seems pretty irrelevant, but a simple WWW 
>server is something many of us have tried or at least thought about.

Some more examples could be: Luke's and Joe's Wikie implementations, 
Samuel's distributed power monitor, or even some of the "User Contributions" 
apps.

In my opinion, a way to "convert" more people to Erlang would be to 
provide/describe/publish some general applications that people can easily 
relate to. A Web server is one of those apps -- what about writing an 
industrial strength one, and show it can easily compete with Apache and 
Xitami?

Vlad
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