Foreword

For a long time, the world of Erlang programming had only one book—The Book,^[1] released in 1993 and revised in 1996. Fanatics can still find it in print, at a price of over $100. A decade or so after its publication, The Book was getting long in the tooth, to say the least. The language had evolved to include several new and powerful programming constructs. Higher-order functions, list comprehensions, and the bit syntax are found everywhere in modern Erlang programs but weren’t described in The Book. But the most notable omission was the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), Erlang’s application development framework, which was first released in 1996. Erlang was rather easy to learn; OTP wasn’t, and early adopters like Martin Logan, who started using Erlang in 1999, pretty much had to learn it the hard way through trial and error.

¹ Robert Virding, Claes Wikstrom, and Mike Williams, Concurrent Programming in Erlang (Prentice Hall, 1993, 1996).

In the past few years, as an indication that Erlang had become interesting enough to justify it, a number of books was released, and we were told that other books were being written. Erlang and OTP in Action by Martin Logan, Eric Merritt, and Richard Carlsson was the one most talked about. And now it is here.