Friday, February 22, 2008

New book from Erlang Training

So, the guys Erlang Consulting and Training are making a new book.

and on the erlang-questions mailing list:

On Feb 21, 2008, at 1:50 PM, Francesco Cesarini wrote:
Our main goal is to cover Erlang in depth. Make sure that newbies struggling with recursion can easily understand it or developers being exposed to pattern matching for the first time use it optimally. The contents of the book are pretty much outlined by the introductory Erlang courses Jan-Henry and I have been giving in the last decade, and based on the knowledge and experience gained when teaching. We know [where] students struggle...
On Feb 21, 2008, at 4:29 PM, some guy wrote:
It's just that, no matter how good it is, with Joe's book already out there - it's not going to be a must read for me.

On Feb 21, 2008, at 3:17 PM, someone else wrote:
Another book on just the Erlang programming language would not find a place on my bookshelf.
These responses kind of made me upset.

I applaud Francesco, and Jan-Henry in getting another book out there. Obviously they have learned from their history areas where new comers to erlang have troubles, and they're making a book to plug that hole. They are of course asking you to look back on your experience coming into erlang, think about what concepts you had troubles with and let them know, this would both help confirm the topics for their book, and possibly give them new topics that are perhaps different than they have been exposed to because they come from people
who don't buy erlang training courses.

Just because you don't need the book now doesn't mean you dont' have something to add.

And sure, we all have frustrations about the OTP stuff, it seems like it might be very very good, and then again it seems pretty opaque. I encourage anyone reading this who knows more OTP to publish more stuff about it.

[ I know I'm calling myself RoscoeOTPColtrain, but right now I'm more roscoe than OTP, but perhaps I'll get there. ]

1 comment:

Jeremy Leader said...

Wow, the idea that "there's one (good) book on the language, there never needs to be another" just amazes me! I can't think of a single language I've seriously used that I didn't end up reading at least two good books about.