[erlang-questions] "Concurrent Programming in Erlang" (Second Edition) Query

[John Duffy]

Hi
I'm learning Erlang with the help of "Concurrent Programming in Erlang" (Second Edition). Being an electrical engineer, I'm a bit stumped by the computer science terminology of the last paragraph of 2.3 Expression Evaluation:
"The evaluator can be thought of as function E which reduces an expression to a ground term:  ... <E examples> ... where APPLY represents a function which applies a function to its arguments".
If there is someone who has this book and can translate this paragraph and the examples into simple engineer speak I would be very grateful.
Kind regards
John 
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