Introducing Erlang

Chapter 12. Next Steps Through Erlang

Hopefully you now feel comfortable writing basic Erlang programs, and understand roughly how modules and processes build into programs. You should be ready to experiment with writing Erlang code, but more importantly, you should be ready to explore other resources for mastering Erlang and its many powerful libraries. There’s a lot to explore!

Moving Beyond the Shell

The Erlang shell is a great place to test code, and to poke and prod Erlang code. You’ll likely spend a lot more time in the shell if you keep using Erlang, but the way you use it may change.

You can compile and run Erlang code outside of the shell, and this makes it much easier to integrate Erlang work with tools you typically use to manage code and related resources. Erlang’s make module is a common place to start, letting you create Emakefile files that provide instruction to the erl -make command.

If you want to automate your Erlang builds further, there are many ways to integrate Erlang with the classic Make toolset. For a more thoroughly Erlang-centric build experience, you may want to explore rebar, at https://github.com/rebar/rebar. You can even mix Make and rebar to apply the strengths of each.

If you want to use Erlang from an IDE, you may want to explore http://erlide.org/, a set of tools for working with Erlang in Eclipse. Emacs users will want to explore the Erlang mode.

Distributed Computing

Almost everything you’ve learned in this book points toward a computing model that ...