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.

Author Simon St. Laurent shows you how to write simple Erlang programs by teaching you one basic 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
Become familiar with Erlang’s basic structures by working with numbers
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