
Learning Erlang as an Experienced Developer - jonalmeida
https://jonalmeida.com/posts/2018/05/01/erlang/
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mikeurbach

      Sadly, I have even less to say about OTP given my limited knowledge of it. I would really like to have another course that would focus more on it.
    

As an experienced programmer learning about the Erlang and Elixir ecosystem, I
found Elixir in Action ([https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-
action](https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action)) an excellent next
step after working through the Elixir guides and writing some small
applications. The examples are written in Elixir rather than Erlang, but
really it is about how to structure OTP applications.

~~~
juhatl
Excellent recommendation. For the people who are considering getting this
book, I would like to point out that a 2nd edition of the book is also
available in the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) [1]. OTP-wise things
haven't really changed much, but the new edition addresses changes in the
Elixir language over the past few years.

[1] [https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action-second-
editio...](https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action-second-edition)

------
rdtsc
I've had about the same experience getting started with Erlang. It was mostly
using recursive, immutable state and the functional style that was hard to get
my head wrapped around.

Pattern matching was somewhat hard but you can of course program by not using
them, then during code reviews, you start getting advice like "split into a
separate function clause". So bit by bit I started to get patter of using
patterns and guards.

A thing that helped there was watching Garrett Smith's "Beautiful Erlang"
video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdJwECjylB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdJwECjylB4)

On concurrency I had already did enough programming with threads before that
and didn't have much difficulty understanding processes, pids and messages.
Well except for being happy to get isolated heaps, smaller size threads (a few
KBs) and supervision trees.

~~~
ams6110
It's funny how people understand different things in different ways. For me,
00 style programming was what I could never get my head fully around. Erlang
immediately made sense to me. It's my favorite language and I wish I could use
it more on the job.

