Programming Erlang--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World


Moore's Law tells us that computing power doubles every two years, and
we've enjoyed faster and faster computers ever since. But Moore's law is
about to break: there's a physical limit to the number of interconnections
you can create on a chip. New multi-core devices—single chips with 2, 4,
or more processors each—are the future.

But that only works if your programs are designed to be concurrent; with
normal software practices and environments, your code will only run on a
single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow.
And writing concurrent programs in many popular programming languages can
be cumbersome and error-prone.

In "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World" (Pragmatic
Bookshelf, US$36.95, 1-934356-00-X), creator Joe Armstrong describes
Erlang, a programming language designed for building highly parallel,
distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for
many years to build massive fault-tolerant systems which run for years
with minimal failures.

According to Joe, programming in Erlang more closely matches the real
world—where we are naturally concurrent. "Erlang programs model how we
think and interact," says Joe. Programming Erlang is much easier than in
conventional languages as in the Erlang world, there are no locks, no
synchronized methods, and no possibility of shared memory corruption.

Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers with no extra code
on your part. Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional
programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems. The
result is a powerful language that makes it much easier to building the
massively parallel networked applications of the future.

This book includes lots of example code you'll be able to build upon. In
addition, it contains the full source code for two interesting
applications:
    * SHOUTcast server to stream music
    * Full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of
data 

The indexing engine is specially written to illustrate how to maximize
throughput on a multi-core CPU.

Erlang is a language used by people in-the-know (just like Ruby was a few
years ago). It solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers
today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems.

Invest in learning Erlang now.


About Erlang:
    * Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault
tolerance.
    * Erlang is used to build internet server applications (mail, web,
etc.), telecommunication switches and applications, database applications,
and more.
    * Erlang excels at controlling systems across several machines and
implementing complex protocol logic—tasks that are very complex in other
languages.
    * Erlang and its libraries are open source; commercial support is also
available. 


"In short, a fantastic book, absolutely recommended to any programmer
interested in learning about a fascinating and very novel programming
language. It's very well written and I was engaged from start to finish." 
--Sam Tregar, use.perl.org


Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
by Joe Armstrong
ISBN 1-934356-00-X, 536 pages, $36.95US, $48.95CA, softcover.


Pragmatic Bookshelf Titles are distributed to bookstores internationally
by O'Reilly Media (http://www.oreilly.com).


Additional Resources:
Sample chapters, table of contents, and more information is available on
the book's home page (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781934356005/).


About Pragmatic Bookshelf:
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