[erlang-questions] Erlang and the learning curve

[JETkoten]

Hi All,

Thanks for the variety of perspectives and resources that you've shared 
regarding my learning curve with Erlang. I'm still making my way through 
them all, and am very grateful for such an overwhelming response.

Two pieces that have really resonated with me so far are Henning's point 
(as I took it) that each programming language basically has its own core 
usage domain and built-in strengths that don't necessarily overlap with 
other languages.

Therefore, my expectation that I can come into Erlang and accomplish 
this kind of screen scraping auto-login stuff that I got partly 
prototyped in just a couple of hours using the Nokogiri and Mechanize 
Ruby gems (being more or less new to programming and new to Ruby) is 
pretty much just as unreasonable as expecting that I could come into 
Ruby and write a fault-tolerant, distributed, concurrent application 
framework like OTP in just a couple of hours. Good point.

Next was Joe's admonition to put Erlang into my spine instead of just 
putting into my brain. In all this time I've been trying to wrap my head 
around Erlang, Now I can see that I should have been spending more time 
wrapping my spine around it. :)

For my books project, I was formerly going to try and approach it from 
start to finish implementing the flow of the functionality starting with 
the http connection (that's not coming easy for me right now) and moving 
on step by step... but since reading some of the posts I've decided to 
see if I can just build whatever parts look like they make sense to me 
now (like the data structure for a book) and go from there, while 
working on Erlang in general with the books and online tutorials 
everyone has shared.

Lastly, thanks for your several offers of help with specifics... I have 
a number of other things going on right now and don't have as much time 
to work on Erlang as I might like at the moment, but as I run into 
specific implementation issues I will gladly post back again and ask for 
the help that you have kindly offered!

Thanks *very* much,
Jack