[erlang-questions] Learning Erlang from the Armstrong book

[Tony Cappellini]

Learning a new language is always a pain.

Having a "popular book" being recommended as "the place to start
from", then struggling trying to figure out why the code in the
"recommended book" doesn't work is even more frustrating.
Almost 50 pages into the book the author has a panel which reads" Some
readers have mistakenly typed into the shell fragements ocf code
contained in the source code listings. These are not valid shell
commands and you will get some strange error message if you try to do
this".

Why is this not in the front of the book? ;-)

So how is a newbie supposed to know which code in the "recommended"
book is valid?