A friend of mine told me about Erlang years ago and said he really liked it.

The same friend recommended Prolog, which Erlang programs somewhat resemble. I am very glad I learned Prolog. I can solve some problems much faster in Prolog than in conventional approaches using Java and SQL, for example.

Erlang is good for fault-tolerant computing and communications. It has very powerful distributed processing capabilities. It has direct support for BER data conversions – which is used in some protocols.

The fact that this book is published by The Practical Programmers told me two things:

1. Erlang has finally gotten noticed by the larger programming community.
2. At last a book that is extremely readable on the subject.

Lots of bloated programming project costs are due to the fact that programmers working on it only know a couple of languages.

There are things called special-purpose languages that are well-suited to solving problems in particular domains.

Learning and eventually judiciously using more than just a couple languages is good risk management and cost-control.

Trying to learn and use a new language at the same time for a commercial project is generally not a good idea from what I have seen. Grabbing a book like this one and studying it at home is a better approach for self-development and professional success.

Lots of things like test data generators, file syntax checkers, database integrity checkers, test clients for server applications – and so forth, can be vastly simplified by using the right language for the job. For these things, I quite often find that the right language is not the same programming language the deliverable is be written in.

So even if I never write a shipping application program in Erlang, I anticipate someday I can benefit greatly from reading this book.