Erlang Progamming available online

The "Erlang Programming" book by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson is now available online, via O'Reilly's Safari service.

Another Erlang Book Project

Hypothetical Labs' Kevin Smith is working on an Erlang book for the Pragmatic Programmers (link). This project will focus on Erlang for web applications. David seems to like what he has seen so far (link).

Erlang on O'Reilly's radar

(Sourc: oreilly.com)

Some numbers on computer language books from an O'Reilly article.

It says

Minor Programming Languages -- 1,000 - 9,999 units in 2007

So the news in this category is that Groovy came out of nowhere and moved quickly up the charts. SAS, and MATlab had nice growth. Erlang, Processing and Nxt-G had no units in 2006 and each sold a nice quantity in 2007. Remember from above, this is the language grouping that grew the most in 2007. More than 14k units were produced by this grouping in 2007 versus 2006.

Well is 14k units really 14,000 books (or pdfs) sold? If we look at the table

*Minor*	U N I T S		T I T L E S		M A R K E T S H A R E
Language	2006 Units	2007 Units	2006 Titles	2007 Titles	06Mkt Share	07Mkt Share
basic	10,660	9,374	10	7	1%	1%
...
groovy	210	4,791	2	3	0%	0%
matlab	2,565	4,602	10	15	0%	0%
assembly	4,727	3,762	14	13	0%	0%
...
latex	2,827	2,718	4	6	0%	0%
erlang	538	624	1	2	0%	0%
awk	3,031	2,572	3	2	0%	0%
...
lua	1,563	2,367	4	3	0%	0%
...
processing	-	1,991	0	3	0%	0%
nxt-g	-	1,659	0	1	0%	0%
lisp	2,085	1,593	7	5	0%	0%
tcl	2,052	1,588	4	5	0%	0%
scheme	1,199	1,271	5	7	0%	0%
haskell	416	1,268	2	4	0%	0%
...

it means that Erlang's "nice quantity" is attached to 624 sold books. That's too low. Either the number is wrong or unit means a larger number of books sold.

New book project: Practical Erlang

After the very friendly reception of Joe Armstrong's new Erlang book last year the climate for new Erlang books seemed good.

Alas the second book project which was announced, a project by Joel Reymont, was stopped.

Now the word got out on another book project, this time by Francesco Cesarini and Jan Henry Nyström of Erlang Training and Consulting, one of the few commercial players in the Erlang world. The project is called "Practical Erlang", the publisher is O'Reilly and involved too is Mike Loukides, editor of "Real World Haskell". Read more here.

Jan Henry's OTP course teaching was excellent, so Your Bear is looking forward to this book.