This brief tutorial introduces Erlang and focuses mainly on the features that make it stand out in the large forest of programming languages: pattern matching, concurrency and distribution, communication using messages, and error handling and recovery.
This tutorial covers high level concepts about Erlang but is technical as well. Having some proficiency in at least one programming language will be helpful, as well as some experience in building software systems.
This tutorial does not require an Erlang development environment, but if you’d like to experiment with the language it will be helpful to have a working copy of Erlang installed on your laptop.
You can download it from here:
Robby Raschke first encountered Erlang about 20 years ago in an obscure paper entitled “Turbo Erlang: Approaching the Speed of C” and as soon as Erlang became publicly available began his quest to use it for real work. He has been working full time with Erlang for the past 10 years, working in diverse areas: using Erlang to orchestrate enterprise application integration, maintain distributed databases, help online betting provide realtime feedback.
