Description:

Conventional wisdom states that you should learn a new programming language every year. The big question is - of course - which one? There's just so many of them, isn't there? Of them all, the functional languages are often the most intriguing, offering - among other things - higher reliability, fewer bugs, less code... assuming you can get your head around them.

In this O'Reilly webcast, Paul Barry talks about his experience learning to program in Erlang, including his motivation for learning it, what Erlang brings to the table and why you might want to make Erlang your next programming language. Along the way he'll touch on Erlang's culture, history,community, syntax, features and power. He'll also talk about the parts of Erlang that just might have you scratching your head in disbelief.

Although Paul presents Erlang from the perspective of a Python programmer, you don't need to know Python at all to get something from this webcast. When a comparison to another programming language is required, Paul presents both the Erlang code and the Python equivalent.

About Paul Barry

Paul Barry lectures at the Institute of Technology, Carlow as part of the Department of Computing & Networking, where he specializes in open source scripting technologies, web development and computer networking. Paul is also a Contributing Editor to Linux Journal magazine, for whom he'd write a lot more articles if only he didn't spend so much time writing technical books. His latest book - part of the popular O'Reilly Head First series - is Head First Programming (co-authored with David Griffiths), which teaches programming concepts to new programmers using Python 3 as the demonstration language. Paul recently completed Head First Python which is designed to help non-Python programmers get up-to-speed with Python and it's technologies as quickly as possible. Paul's two other books are based on Perl (and are published by Wiley).