Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#11

Post by tdavis » Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 9:52 PM UTC

babo wrote: post #5

qhoxie wrote: post #2

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang No question. Written by the author of the language. It has lots of great practical examples and walks you through everything from start to finish. http://www.trapexit.org also has some really nice tutorials and discussion.

It's an amazing book, a rare example of well balanced content. Highly recommended.

This.

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#12

Post by balpreetspankaj » Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 10:07 PM UTC

A few days ago, I was looking at this presentation on Erlang presented at one of Google Tech Talk. This was my first introduction to Erlang and I found it very informative.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=240707194662243675&#...

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#13

Post by moonpolysoft » Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 10:10 PM UTC

tdupree wrote: post #3

After seeing it referenced a lot on HN, I've also been really interested in learning Erlang. What projects have you fellow hackers used/are using Erlang for? Are you glad you did?

I wrote a clone of Amazon's dynamo. It really helped speed up development vs. trying to do it in a language like Java or C++. http://github.com/cliffmoon/dynomite

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#14

Post by RKlophaus » Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 11:24 PM UTC

tdupree wrote: post #3

After seeing it referenced a lot on HN, I've also been really interested in learning Erlang. What projects have you fellow hackers used/are using Erlang for? Are you glad you did?

I just published a screencast demo of a web framework that I made in Erlang, called Nitrogen.

See http://nitrogen-erlang.tumblr.com

Also, the technology behind my startup company, Stitcho.com is in Erlang. See http://www.stitcho.com

I would definitely recommend it, especially if you are one of those people who really stretches a language. Once you get past the new syntax, it is very quick to learn.

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#15

Post by damienkatz » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 1:05 AM UTC

The best way to learn any language is to build stuff. Build something you think is cool. Allow yourself to suck at it and do everything wrong. Then build it again, or build something else cool.

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#16

Post by brianr » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 1:42 AM UTC

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #10

brianr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a message queue server that uses the memcached protocol (so I could use memcache client libraries to connect to it), similar to Starling/Sparrow. Starling and Sparrow kept falling over from the volume of connections, so I decided to write my own in Erlang. We've been using it in production for about 6 months now, and it works great.

Any plans to open source it?

Yeah, that's been on my list for months. Maybe I'll get to it this weekend...

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#17

Post by prakash » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 5:28 AM UTC

qhoxie wrote: post #2

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang No question. Written by the author of the language. It has lots of great practical examples and walks you through everything from start to finish. http://www.trapexit.org also has some really nice tutorials and discussion.

The trapexit guys are planning to release "Practical Erlang Programing".

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#18

Post by tlrobinson » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 5:43 AM UTC

Bob Ippolito (who wrote mochiweb, a webserver written in Erlang) did an introductory talk last year: http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2008/03/08/exploring-erlan...

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#19

Post by gqwu » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 7:36 AM UTC

1) read all courses in http://www.erlang.org/course/course.html then do the exercises in http://www.erlang.org/course/exercises.html

2) read official Getting Started manual http://erlang.org/doc/getting_started/part_frame.html

3) learn about erlang OTP http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/part_frame.html

4) this book is a MUST get! "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World" by Joe Armstrong http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang

good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch

#20

Post by JustAGeek » Fri, Oct 17, 2008, 7:59 AM UTC

qhoxie wrote: post #2

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang No question. Written by the author of the language. It has lots of great practical examples and walks you through everything from start to finish. http://www.trapexit.org also has some really nice tutorials and discussion.

Yes it really is a great book!

However, it is by no means a suitable book for people who haven't programmed anything yet, the author assumes that you are already familiar with coding. So for absolute beginners the book is probably way too difficult.