About This Book
This book is focused on getting real, stable, versioned, and maintainable software out into the world. It’s less theoretical, and more hands-on practical. We (the authors) have put many systems into production over the years, and in this book we distill that knowledge for use in real software development. Our focus is not just the Erlang programming language by itself—other books out there are more suited as language tutorials. This book is about the practice of writing Erlang code for production.
Because this book is aimed at allowing individual programmers or teams of programmers across a company to write effective code, it covers Erlang/OTP right from the start, not just Erlang the language. Erlang by itself offers the potential for powerful applications to be created, but it’s with OTP that it realizes that potential. OTP is simultaneously a framework, a set of libraries, and a methodology for structuring applications; it’s really a language extension. To learn Erlang for the real world means learning Erlang/OTP.
This book illustrates how to use Erlang/OTP in practice, through carefully chosen realistic examples. By implementing these examples for yourself, you’ll come to understand how to build solid, versioned, production-ready code that is ready to utilize every cycle of that 32-core machine you have sitting in your server rack!