Other than specific projects (although those are welcome as well)...
What tools, books, articles, and other resources should I have at my desk to help me learn Erlang?
Also, are there mobile runtimes for Erlang?
Please point me in the right direction.
Note: yes, I have visited Erlang and Wikipedia, but I'd like to hear some reliable, experienced opinions.
I'm a month-or-so into learning and the guides I'm enjoying most are:
I think you can dive into the Getting Started guide straight away and it will certainly give you a feel for functional programming and then concurrency.
If you're in London this June there is the Erlang Factory conference which looks really good.
While I remember, these are two good presentations taking you through Erlang and it's uses:
Finally, you can follow my learning experiences on my blog (joelhughes.co.uk/blog) my step by step adjustment of FizzBuzz from python/ruby/php to Erlang might give you a good flavour (sorry about the shameless self promotion).
I have to say learning Erlang is currently one of my greatest pleasures, there is something very satisfying about it!
I found the best thing to do to learn erlang was reading joe's thesis http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf and then writing something I enjoyed, for me it was an iax2 server.
What I can recommend you is not to browse the Wings3d source code.
(I did it and it was a waste of time similar as when I tried to read the Quake2 sources :-p)
I have the both the Erlang Progamming and the Software for a Concurrent World, both are excellent. I might almost say the Erlang Programming is better, it shows a lot more about using OTP (Erlang libraries), but I was also a little more comfortable with the language when I was reading it, so that's what I was looking for.
The Getting Started with Erlang Guide is also pretty good.
Definitely you should give writing a simple server a try. That's one of the areas where Erlang really shines and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around message passing and the gen_server module.
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Also, you can run Erlang on ARM based mobile devices (ARMv5+) for sure, you could ask on erlang-questions for other architectures. Check out http://wiki.trapexit.org/index.php/Cross_compiling for the basics of getting started with cross-compiling.
