- Author:
- Joe Armstrong
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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Index Terms
- Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
Recommendations
Radu State
I don't know how many programmers have heard of the Erlang programming language. I conducted a small survey in my office, and the received answers varied from "never heard of it" to something like "exotic proprietary language used by telcos"; in all honesty, this was not a big surprise. It's hard to explain why so few people know about it, since the Erlang programming language offers so much in terms of elegance in programming, and support for multithreaded and multicore computer programming. Most probably the answer lies in the missing commercial advertisement and lobbying. This book offers one of the best introductions to this programming language, and manages to introduce three very different aspects: functional programming, fault-tolerant applications, and multicore computer programming. These three features represent the strengths of the Erlang programming language, but require also the most transition effort from developers who are used to standard and imperative programming languages. Armstong structures his book accordingly, and addresses Erlang programming from these three viewpoints. The first eight chapters of the book describe the elements of the programming language: syntax and runtime environments. The next part (chapters 9 to 14) goes into more advanced topics, like distributed client-server programming, using files, and network sockets. The code examples are very realistic, and even a fully functional SHOUTcast server is developed in chapter 14. Chapter 10 is a must-read: the reader learns to appreciate the power of the programming language for distributed and cluster-oriented applications. The third part of the book (chapters 15 to 18) covers some extremely powerful libraries used to build commercial-grade and industrial-scale applications. These libraries include support for large data storage requirements and application-level fault tolerance. The many details encountered in real development are discussed in chapter 18. Finally, the fourth part of the book (chapters 19 and 20) addresses the aspects of multicore computer programming with Erlang. This is a truly interesting and rewarding read for those interested in Erlang. Readers interested in learning and leveraging a powerful programming language, which is currently used by a number of people, will surely like it. I am convinced that future evolutions of this language will one day become mainstream development environments, and as such I recommend the book to all those interested in grasping the essentials of a potential next-generation programming language. This book also makes for great reading for an audience just looking for an alternative to the current state of the art; this book should rank highly on their reading lists. Online Computing Reviews Service
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