Erlang in Real Time

Bingo!

Have you ever noticed how asking a question attracts serendipitous answers? I don’t mean like:

Ques: “Where’s the nearest Startbucks?”

Ans: “One block down, turn left, and it’s another block down on your right.”

I mean you ask the question, then go about your business and, out of the blue, you stumble across the answer from an unexpected source.

This sort of happened to me just minutes ago.

So far in this blog we’ve been exploring Erlang web servers, trying to understand what makes them tick. I got hung up trying to understand anonymous functions and noted the challenge of keeping track of running processes while tracing an Erlang program. hokan suggested that I look at UML sequence diagrams. Based on that, I suggested a yet-to-be-written graphics tool that might help newbies better understand message traffic among processes in an Erlang program.

So, earlier this morning I was googling around with no particular goal in mind and what do I find? An on-line Erlang course by Maurice Castro called Erlang in Real Time.

http://www.castro.aus.net/~maurice/serc/erlbk/

I’ve just skimmed so far, but it looks like an outstanding supplement to Joe Armstrong’s Programming Erlang. Among other things, it has a nice discussion of functions, a chapter on web programming that includes source for a super simple web server, and a fairly meaty chapter on graphics programming with Erlang gs.

So, for now, I’m headed back to school. If you don’t hear from me for a day or so, it’s because I’m working my way through Castro.

Take a look and let’s compare notes.