Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Not Just a Rumour

Just a quick update to yesterday’s post. I think we can confirm this rumour. As Mamut mentioned this presentation mentions the book. I’ve also heard back from Mike Loukides inside O’Reilly. I asked him if O’Reilly was really working on an Erlang book, and he told me:





It’s true. There’s not much that I can say right now—the Erlang book is still in the very early stages. So any predictions I can make about when it’s likely to be available are likely to be wrong. But they’re off to a good start, though.





Good news all around.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Pat, good detective work. It is no secret, nor is it a rumor. It is a fact. “Practical Erlang Programming” will be published by O’Reilly. We are lucky to be working with Mike Loukides, the editor of Real World Haskell and author of many successful O’Reilly Books. We just haven’t gone and told everyone or announced it on the Erlang mailing list as we are too busy writing. When the first few chapters are completed, we will do the rounds and ask for volunteers for reviews and feedback. Time permitting, we hope to set up a website and blog about the experiences of writing the book.

Who are we? The book is being written by me (Francesco Cesarini), and Jan Henry Nyström. I am the founder and CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting. Having come across Erlang in 1993, I’ve been working with it as a trainer, consultant, system architect and developer full time since 1995. Jan-Henry Nyström has been using Erlang since 1996, having been involved in numerous research projects, including the Erlang / C++ comparison jointly done with Motorola at Heriot Watt University, and more recently, on his PhD on fully automated fault tolerant properties of Erlang/OTP applications. He is currently the training manager at Erlang Training and Consulting teaching Erlang on all continents.

As a template, we are using the contents and examples in our training material. The material is well tested and proven to fulfill its purpose, namely teach Erlang. We are confident the result will be a perfect complement to Joe’s book, where we cover much less in much more depth. We want to ensure that the Ruby Programmer who is struggling to understand recursion manages to do so with the help of the book alone, and that the University student who has never come across pattern patching uses it optimally. For industrial users, the final chapter will introduce OTP and provide an overview of the design patterns. Unlike Armstrong’s book, Mnesia and other OTP or open source applications will not be covered.

I hope the above is enough to respond to some of the rumors, at least for the time being. We would love an interview and look forward to hearing from you.