[erlang-questions] Practical Erlang

[Tony Pedley]

Great News!! Put me down for a copy when it comes out.

Just some observations

Firstly there is no doubt that a book of this type is needed. Joe's book was
great, but it could only go so far and I for one was left with a need for
more but no where to scratch the itch so to speak. So a book that goes into
greater detail will be a great addition.

As one thread said a section about debugging would be useful. I've read
comments by many who seem to find debugging erlang hard, presumably because
of the lack of a visual debugger. So real examples on the erlang debugging
philosophy would be also be useful.

Saying that one of the disappointments of Joel Reymont's book not coming
out(in a paper form anyway) is that it was going to cover the Erlang from
the point of view of a real world application. It seems to me that
languages, however useful, are only as good as their applications. Take ruby
as an example. Until Ruby on rails came along, it had far less exposure than
it has now.

It's not hard to see that Erlang's sweet spot is Concurrency and Reliability
.  As much was said in Joe's book, however this came at the end of the book
leaving little space for explanation. I would like to see how real world
problems are being solved by Erlang.

The book I recently finished was Beautiful Code by O'Reilly which not only
is a very good book , but seems to me as a good model for how a Erlang
application book could be put together. If the great and the good of the
Erlang world could put together articles on how Erlang made there
lives/jobs/world better then together with a good editor I am sure it would
make an great read. It wouldn't necessarily be that expensive to do since
sites such as lulu.com allow book publishing to be a lot cheaper than they
were. Maybe your next project Francesco* :)*

As someone said a book covering OTP would be good, however I can see the
point that we need to go one step at a time. Anyway after only 2 Erlang
books in 10 years, any addition is greatly appreciated.

Anyway good luck on the book, I'll be watching with interest

Tony
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