| | |  | Manager's Guides to Computing | Home » » » Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World | | | | | | | Description: | | Erlang solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems. It's used worldwide by companies who need to produce reliable, efficient, and scalable applications. Invest in learning Erlang now. Moore's Law is the observation that the amount you can do on a single chip doubles every two years. But Moore's Law is taking a detour. Rather than producing faster and faster processors, companies such as Intel and AMD are producing multi-core devices: single chips containing two, four, or more processors. If your programs aren't concurrent, they'll only run on a single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow. Erlang is a programming language designed for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for many years to build massive fault-tolerated systems that run for years with minimal failures. Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers: this means your Erlang program should run a lot faster on a 4 core processor than on a single core processor, all without you having to change a line of code. Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems to make a powerful language for building the massively parallel, networked applications of the future. This book presents Erlang and functional programming in the familiar Pragmatic style. And it's written by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang. It includes example code you'll be able to build upon. In addition, the book contains the full source code for two interesting applications: A SHOUTcast server which you can use to stream music to every computer in your house, and a full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of data. Learn how to write programs that run on dozens or even hundreds of local and remote processors. See how to write robust applications that run even in the face of network and hardware failure, using the Erlang programming language.
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• ISBN13: 9781934356005
• Condition: New
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Joe Armstrong | | Paperback:
| 536 pages | | Publisher:
| Pragmatic Bookshelf | | Publication Date:
| July 18, 2007 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 193435600X | | Product Length:
| 8.9 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.6 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.99 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.74 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.82 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.56 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.02 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 35 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 35 customer reviews )
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43 of 48 found the following review helpful:
 Good, But Not GreatAug 08, 2007
By Seth H. Ladd
There aren't a lot of Erlang books out there, so if you want to learn Erlang, you need this book.
However, I found the writing style a bit preachy. The organization of the book needs work, as the author is constantly referring to topics he hasn't covered yet. I also found that the index needs a lot of work, as it's missing quite a few topics that I know are in the book. The API reference also is missing some functions, which I thought was odd.
This book does a good job in promoting Erlang's ability to do concurrency well. I was hoping to get more functional programming style and mind set from the book, though.
All in all a good book to have if you want Erlang, but you'll need more if you want to really dive into functional programming or if you want a complete Erlang reference.
39 of 44 found the following review helpful:
 A programmer's library must-haveJul 19, 2007
By Paul Mineiro
The computer language Erlang is mature and impressive, with primitives for concurrent, fault-tolerant, and distributed programming that make it a natural for internet applications. So why isn't Erlang more popular in America? The lack of recent accessible introductions in English is probably one reason.
This book fills that void. If you've been wondering what Erlang is about, you need to get this book. It's very readable and does not require any prior experience with functional languages to make headway. It's packed with examples and the book encourages experimenting with them; in fact the first chapter explains how to get an installation of Erlang.
My one complaint is that some areas are omitted or only lightly treated, for instance mnesia and parse transformations. However there is extensive documentation on the internet available for these and other advanced Erlang features. This book will get you to journeyman level and allow you to leverage those online resources.
Even if you never plan to use Erlang, you should read this book, since Joe Armstrong's wisdom on how to build fault-tolerant software is sprinkled throughout (of course, why implement half of Erlang in a bug-ridden fashion in some other language, when you can get the real thing).
26 of 29 found the following review helpful:
 Are you already familiar with functional programming?Jan 30, 2008
By J. Pease
Erlang really appears to be an interesting language, and the author's enthusiasm for the subject shows - which is good. It helped me to keep going, when at times the code was a little hard to follow.
The book does a good job of introducing the language. In particular later chapters give emphasis to the topics of concurrency through multiple processes, multi-cores and distributed programs. All very timely subjects for a world that is connected to the Internet, and where even laptops have multi-core processors
I gave the book a 4 star rating because I feel the author somewhat forgot who his audience is.
On page 5 he starts out with a description that fit me almost perfectly, and probably many other readers: "Once upon a time a programmer came across a book describing a funny programming language. It had an unfamiliar syntax [...] it wasn't even object-oriented. The programs were, well, different....Not only were the programs different, but the whole approach to programming was different."
After reading the book I don't feel like the "Erlang Master" that the road map described (pg 9). While the syntax is now familiar, I still look at the Erlang code and it feels foreign. I still have to "decipher" the code instead of read it.
I would have liked the book to more fully address the items from the "Once upon a time" paragraphs. Being that "the whole approach to programming" is different than the OO that many readers are used to, I would have liked to have seen a chapter (or three) on how to best get into that mode of thinking.
I do think the book is a good jumping off point. It gives you more than enough to get started.
However, if you are unfamiliar with languages where functions accept functions which also accept functions as parameters and return another function as a result, you may end up feeling (as I did) that you only have half the puzzle.
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Necessary book, but needs a 2nd editionMar 05, 2008
By Christian J. Convey
I've been working through this book and am very glad for it. I'm not sure how else I'd efficiently have gotten up to speed on Erlang.
The book does need lots of minor work, though - it still feels like a beta piece of software. There are examples / explanations that make use of not-yet (or never) explained functions/modules. The appendix describing some of Erlang's modules only claims that the set of documented modules is incomplete, but doesn't mention that the set of functions within some modules is also incomplete. Etc.
Another issue is the license of the code examples. The author shows some example code for how to do certain things, such as a distributed map function (pmap). After reading the book, it's hard (at least for a newbie) to imagine a different solution than the author's. But if you go to the website containing the example code from the book, you find a pretty restrictive license on the example code. So this leaves the reader in a difficult position: the book only shows you one way to do something like pmap, and the author has a license on that code that makes it unusable to many readers. This is more than a little frustrating.
Finally, the index is very incomplete.
If you're new to Erlang you still want this book. But it would really be a good thing for the author to gather criticism (if he hasn't already) and go a second round.
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Erlang is going to be the future for performance computing...Jan 10, 2008
By thanos vassilakis
"thanos"
Erlang is the language to use for developing concurrent or distributive systems. I first used Erlang when I worked for Ericsson in 1997 programming Telecom switch control systems. We developed an elegant monitoring and control system that managed thousands of switches across the world, and is still in use today offering "Nine-Nines" of reliability. Ten years on and Erlang would still be the best choice - stackless python being the other - and in these passing ten years Erlang has really matured.
Now if you like books and would like to learn more about Erlang I recommend this book. Its author, Joe Armstrong, one of the fathers of Erlang, has a clean and elegant style that makes reading his book a pleasure, and although I'm an old hand I learned a lot from his book. So briefly here are the books Pros and Cons:
The Pros:
* Written by a real expert.
* Great introduction to Erlang
* Up to date with the language
* Full of great examples, such as the quick sort in Chapter 3, or showing how to implement "Google's" Map/Reduce in a few lines, or building pipes in Chapter 12.
The Cons:
* I would have liked more on philosophy and design. Erlang is different and you just can't come from the OO world of C++ or Java and program in Erlang. You have to change the way you think. It would be great if Armstrong gave us some help here, just as Stroustrup gave us in Part IV of his second edition.
* I would also liked a whole section on OPT or the authors equivalent framework.
* Also More on distribution and robust development.
Otherwise the book is great and with the very good material you can find on the web at the Erlang site or trapexit.org you should be set to make your millions writing a distributed financial analytical engine for all those very rich and greedy banks!
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