Joe Armstrong (1) (1950–2019)

As of 2009 there are not many alternatives to learn the powerful programming language Erlang and the OTP (Open Telecom Platform). This is THE book written by the designer and implementor of Erlang, Joe Armstrong and he seems to know what he is talking about. High quality humour may not be one of Armstrong's strengths but when it comes to finding attractive examples he shines using his favorite language and platform.

This may not be the perfect book, it has its problems such as promising that some things will be pointed out but the chapter ends without fulfilling it. A few minor frustrations aside the book provides a very good overview of the most important points of Erlang with enough breadth and depth. The chapter where Armstrong talks about a simple server then adding transaction semantics, fault tolerance, hot code swapping, etc. is a kind of tour de force. Another good application is a Shoutcast server implementation in just a few lines of code. It would be very good to compare this example to Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp [1].

If you want to learn more about this kind of programming, I'd definitely suggest reading 'Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming' [2] which shows the Oz programming language and the Mozart platform and teaches the fundamentals of message-passing concurrency and network-transparent distributed programming.

Finally it must be repeated that Erlang has a very high-quality VM along with mature libraries for concurrency and reliability. If you want to experience industrial-strength distributed and / or multicore applications that scales well then it would be only wise to follow the advice of Joe Armstrong.

Warning: If you are not exposed to Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, Oz, etc. beforehand be careful for a different kind of syntax and semantics. You'll have to unlearn a few concepts to understand the power of new concepts.

1- http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
2- http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html… (mehr)