June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
494 pages
14h 7m
English
Content preview from Erlang ProgrammingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Preface
What made us start writing this book in the first place is the enthusiasm we share for Erlang. We wanted to help get the word out, giving back a little of what the community has given to us. Although we both got into Erlang for very different reasons, the end result was the same: lots of fun hours doing lots of fun stuff at a fraction of the effort it would have taken with other languages. And best of all, it is not a tool we use for hobby projects, but one we use on a daily basis in our real jobs!
Francesco: Why Erlang?
The year was 1994. While studying computer science at Uppsala University, one of the courses I took was on parallel programming. The lecturer held up the first edition of Concurrent Programming in Erlang (Prentice Hall) and said, “Read it.” He then held up a handout and added, “These are the exercises, do them,” after which Erlang barely got a mention; it was quickly overshadowed with the theory of threads, shared memory, semaphores, and deadlocks.
As the main exercise for this course, we had to implement a simulated world inhabited by carrots, rabbits, and wolves. Rabbits would roam this world eating carrots that grew in random patches. When they had eaten enough carrots, the rabbits would get fat and split in two. Wolves ran around eating up the rabbits; if they managed to catch and eat enough rabbits, they would also get fat and split. Rabbits and wolves within a certain distance of each other would broadcast information on food and predators. If a rabbit ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.