[erlang-questions] feedback please

[zxq9]

On Thursday 24 September 2015 09:03:26 Roelof Wobben wrote:
> that quick to concencurry. The book has a chapter of error handling, 
> maps , binaries, dialyzer and compiling with a make file,
> So in my oponion I not done with sequantial erlang. I think it wll take 
> me a week before Im there.

Nah, maps, binaries and dialyzer are not huge subjects by themselves. Well, dialyzer can be, but I doubt it is treated in full detail in the book.

Maps will be familiar to you if you've ever used a language that has hashes/maps/dictionaries (or whatever key:value store) -- or if you've used Erlang dicts. The functional interface to maps (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/maps.html) and dicts (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/dict.html) is very similar, and neither is very far from the spirit of many of the lists module functions (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/lists.html).

Your initial understanding of binaries will focus on two things:
1- The difference between lists and binaries (in particular, binary strings and lists-as-strings)
2- Erlang's magical syntax for binaries (which is really quite nice)

Dialyzer is interesting. Hopefully you will get a solid introduction to it here. But, like many of the advanced Erlang tools, it is something that will only start to seem painfully relevant to your life once you've worked on a project long enough to confuse yourself with it (and people are depending on it to work). You'll probably do this once, and then sit down and really learn how and when to use Dialyzer (among other tools -- there are a ton of really slick things available you'll learn about as you use Erlang more).

Make is its own little world and learning it could be its own week. But you won't be going all that far into it in an Erlang book, I imagine. Make is just a very nice little tool to automate a lot of the command line drugery of building things that depend on other things. It is not even a part of Erlang, just a very comfortable script-my-build-steps-away tool once you get to know how it works (and not just for Erlang, for nearly anything).

So no, you're not that far away. Don't despair. :-)

-Craig