A disclaimer, to start it all off, in the interest of fairness and honesty: I got a review copy of the book from No Starch Press, and was asked to review it.

I remember a couple of years ago, on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) that Fred had started writing a series of articles on how Erlang worked. It all began in the small, with him writing about the language constructs, the data types, how to use the language on so on. Everytime he wrote a chapter, he would seek out the help of the channel for proofreading the parts and for suggestions how to improve it. I like Fred's work because he made a good introduction to the language and I had a place to point whenever somebody wanted to learn about Erlang. Even better, it was a free resource, straight on the web, and you could just send a link to somebody about a complicated part.

I am not sure how much Fred really envisioned it as a book. He started off from the idea of "Learn you a Haskell for greater good" which is a book written in the same, light, style. But as time passed, he kept writing and he kept adding more chapters to the book. It was also nice when Fred had covered another subject, since it eased the transition for new Erlang programmers. We had another source we could point to when people wanted to consider those aspects of the language.

Since then, Fred has written chapters on concurrency, on distribution and on general program design in Erlang. His style has always been to mix up fact and fun, and he avoided falling into the trap of writing a book full of boring tirades on the language. There is a reader group for such a book as well, but we already have that covered by a language definition and a short tutorial. Many people have enjoyed his book.

And now—now you can get the book in dead wood as well! No starch press made this possible and published all of Fred's amazing work, so you can go buy a book to read everywhere. It is an excellent introduction to Erlang and you can go to the web and look for the first chapter or two in order to get a feel for his writing style. If it is one you like, you should definitely consider buying the book. While the style may be too slow for a seasoned functional programmer, it is the right fit if you have yet to experience functional programming. I know that many people still prefer a book when they are reading. The reasons for this are many, but reading off a low resolution screen doesn't have the same feel to it as printed text. A side-effect is that the book has cleaned up all of the writing and made it clearer.

The major selling point of this book is that it contains it all. You will be exposed to sequential, concurrent and distributed Erlang. Fred also covers some parts which are often skipped in other books, like the dialyzer, mnesia and ETS tables. He also covers most of the testing tools like EUnit and Common Test. And in addition, Fred explains how OTP works and how to structure your OTP applications. Few other books offer that level of depth. Many of the chapters cover things which I consider to be essential to efficient Erlang programming in the large: especially the dialyzer, releases, testing and ETS are important for the professional Erlang programmer.

If you want to know it all, LYSE is a great book to buy. And you can buy it here:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com