If you’re new to Erlang, its functional style can seem difficult, but with help from this hands-on introduction, you’ll scale the learning curve and discover how enjoyable, powerful, and fun this language can be.

In this updated second edition, author Simon St.Laurent shows you how to write simple Erlang programs by teaching you one skill at a time. You’ll learn about pattern matching, recursion, message passing, process-oriented programming, and establishing pathways for data rather than telling it where to go. By the end of your journey, you’ll understand why Erlang is ideal for concurrency and resilience.

Get cozy with Erlang’s shell, its command line interface

Define functions, using the fun tool, to represent repeated calculations

Discover atoms, pattern matching, and guards: the foundations of your program structure

Delve into the heart of Erlang processing with recursion, strings, lists, and higher-order functions

Create processes, send messages among them, and apply pattern matching to incoming messages

Store and manipulate structured data with Erlang Term Storage and the Mnesia database

Learn about Open Telecom Platform, Erlang’s open source libraries and tools