quarta-feira, 29 de setembro de 2010

Erlang and OTP in Action review (part 1)


This is the first post about the review i'm doing on the book Erlang and OTP in Action (MEAP) by Martin Logan, Eric Merritt and Richard Carlsson and published by Manning (http://www.manning.com/logan/). 
This review will be a collection of posts describing my experience as i follow this book.
I started my reading at Appendix A where installation methods for different Operating Systems of Erlang are described. This section gives clear and concise directions as how you can get Erlang installed in your system. Being a Ubuntu user i already had it trough the distribution package manager but still could find very good use for this section as i followed instructions and got Erlang installed at a Mac computer trough faxien.
Next i went straight to chapter 1 where the authors explain the meaning of OTP and give us an insight of what Erlang is.
Trough this chapter we get to know some of the key concepts associated with Erlang: Distribution, Concurrency, Fault-Tolerance. We also get familiar with the Erlang runtime system and virtual machine.
I'm finding this book useful for what i want, to get a good insight into the technology/language. More than code listings showing how to say hello to the world or how to write the next social media revolution app i need to understand what i'm doing and most of all why !
I'm looking forward to get into the next chapter (Erlang language essentials) and as soon as i get there you'll be the first one to know ...

segunda-feira, 6 de setembro de 2010

Started reading Erlang OTP in Action

Guilty ! I got the book a couple of weeks ago and i haven't started reading it ...
But all is about to change now. I started reading the book and i will start publishing my impressions on it as i go along. Stay tunned !