Erlang and OTP in Action review (part 1)

This is the first post about the review i'm doing on the book Erlang and OTP in Action (MEAP) by Martin Logan, Eric Merritt and Richard Carlsson and published by Manning (http://www.manning.com/logan/). 

This review will be a collection of posts describing my experience as i follow this book.

I started my reading at Appendix A where installation methods for different Operating Systems of Erlang are described. This section gives clear and concise directions as how you can get Erlang installed in your system. Being a Ubuntu user i already had it trough the distribution package manager but still could find very good use for this section as i followed instructions and got Erlang installed at a Mac computer trough faxien.

Next i went straight to chapter 1 where the authors explain the meaning of OTP and give us an insight of what Erlang is.

Trough this chapter we get to know some of the key concepts associated with Erlang: Distribution, Concurrency, Fault-Tolerance. We also get familiar with the Erlang runtime system and virtual machine.

I'm finding this book useful for what i want, to get a good insight into the technology/language. More than code listings showing how to say hello to the world or how to write the next social media revolution app i need to understand what i'm doing and most of all why !

I'm looking forward to get into the next chapter (Erlang language essentials) and as soon as i get there you'll be the first one to know ...

Started reading Erlang OTP in Action

Guilty ! I got the book a couple of weeks ago and i haven't started reading it ...
But all is about to change now. I started reading the book and i will start publishing my impressions on it as i go along. Stay tunned !

When easy became easier ...

In the last couple of weeks i have been analyzing, modelling and choosing some tools to build a small app. When i started this project i was perhaps a bit naive in thinking that i would be coding in no time ! Yes it's true, the model seems to be quite consistent, scalable (and i'm quite happy with it). Now cold and true reality ... if anyone has already tried to configure Hibernate (trough annotations or XML) in a way he could easily map 3 levels of inheritance with the 2 top classes being abstract knows what's the cold and true reality i'm talking about ! It was easier than JDBC (or at least more comfortable to me) but any change i would have to do in any of the classes implied fiddling with a huge amount of code.
Then it came to me: What if i can find some tool(s) that allow me to kind of build a skeleton of my app and then start polishing it ? The good news (at least for me) is that i , not only have found Grails but also Roo (SpringRoo). Believe me that's when easy became easier !

SpringRoo: http://www.springsource.org/roo

Grails:        http://www.grails.org/

Check those 2 pages ... perhaps those tools will come on handy for your project, but one thing is for sure: you will have lot's of fun !

Erlang in Action MEAP

Ok i'm warming up... by this time i already have my virtual machine ready with Ubuntu. I'll be starting real soon to post my experience in following the book. It will be a review as you follow thing !

an interesting article : 10-reasons-why-people-initially-suck-at-programming

Here is the link: http://talkbinary.com/articles/10-reasons-why-people-initially-suck-at-programming/

I saw people using reason #3 so many times during the last three years ... guys listen up : the resources are there for the taking. We never had so many information available like today ...

a book review is always a good excuse to learn...

A couple of days ago while i was browsing trough some tweets i found one that caught my attention. Manning, the book publisher was looking for reviewers for this book http://www.manning.com/logan/
I sent an email saying that i'm a complete noob (though i can tell Erlang from an apple) but that i wished to learn Erlang for a long time and this would be the perfect oportunity. Guess what ? They've sent me a copy !
I will be posting my progress trough the book and hopefully i'll actually learn some Erlang.

some Groovy stuff ...

I'm currently working on a project that has started, at least conceptually, in Java. It's an app for managing some patient records and to give some kind of statistical information to healthcare professionals. Entity classes, persistence layers, DAO pattern, mobile interface, native interface ... and so on ...
I thought Spring might be the way. Ok next step "Springify" my app.
But wait... i don't know how to do it !
No problem grabbed some books watched some lectures browsed some tutorials and off we go !

At some point i started wondering ... what if there is a way to prototype this app in an elegant and less verbose way ? That would be great, i could take a more try-and-buy approach. If something doesn't make sense go back and follow another path.

Then i met Grails, it's Groovy, it's Java(ish), i can use Spring stuff, there is also Hibernate. Oh well it was love at first sight (i can assure you that we kept on dating and i'm still quite happy) !