On this token does anyone have any tutorial that actually goes through building a complete erlang program and not snippets of code here and there?

Not the best tutorial ever, but I found it helpful.. It describes a fairly simple, but non-trivial task (creating an RSS feed from your email inbox, generating the RSS feed, and directly interacting with the POP3 protocol over SSL)

Also, most of the code will require slight modification to work with the most recent version of Erlang. This seems like a bad thing, but it forces you to actually understand the code and determine what broke, rather than just copy-and-pasting everything.. For example, the regexp module had changed name, so I prodded around the erlang library code to see where it went, and if the arguments had changed - in doing so I realised how simple (most of) the code was, something I wouldn't have done if the tutorial was "better"..

I'm still accepting criticism and fixes if you see any mistake or whatever. Have a nice read :)

Cesarini/Thompson book is excellent, aside from typo's but it's like drinking from a firehose. Good for people who like ruby, python, scheme DSL / metaprogramming tricks, challenging for everybody else.

One thing, can you give more vertical space between lines in source code listings (the bits in Courier font; also listing of shell/interpreter sessions). They're jammed tightly together in Firefox 3.0.14, winXP SP 3.

    1> 1+1

    1> 1+1 .
    2

In the Erlang shell, expressions have to be terminated with a period followed by whitespace (line break, a space etc.)

Maybe I should try to make it even more apparent (or add a picture). I can remember being stumped by the same thing when I first got to try the shell.

Scroll down to the 'note' to see it. I don't explain 'and' vs 'andalso' though, but they are mentioned in an earlier chapter: 'and' will evaluate both its arguments, but 'andalso' will only do so when needed.

I still don't understand why Erlang doesn't allow the nesting of "," and ";" (which would make 'andalso' and 'orelse' useless in guards). There seems to be no plan to change that, even if big names [in the community] like Richard O'Keefe would like the same thing.

http://www.nabble.com/Reading%2C-Learning%2C-Confused-to1854...

(Modules page just above "More about modules") you talk about compiling to Hipe, but it doesn't say that you ahve to ./configure it in. This seems to be a common configure:

./configure --enable-hipe --enable-smp-support --enable-threads

As introductions go, _The Art of Prolog_ is also a great book (like SICP great), and spends a lot of time on the logic programming paradigm and its big ideas rather than Prolog-specific details. _Clause and Effect_ by Clocksin is a _The Little Schemer_-like intro, though its style is a little more conventional.

The biggest (IMHO) justifiable complaint against Python's indentation-sensitive syntax is that it makes copying and pasting harder (in editors that don't support it or with people who don't know the indentation commands...), but I've had more luck copying-and-pasting Python (with no adjustment) than I have Erlang. With Python you have good odds that you're on the same indentation in both source and dest, with Erlang the odds that you're going to screw up ",;. " (and note the space in that quote on the end, it's part of the set) approach 100% in my experience.

Nice language in many ways... shame about the syntax.

"." ends an expression in the shell.

In modules, "." ends forms. Forms are module attributes and function declarations. Forms are technically not expressions as they don't return anything. This is why they are terminated in a different manner than the rest. Given forms =/= expressions, It could be argued that the shell's use of "." is what's not standard here.

"," separates expressions:

  C = A+B, D = A+C

  Var = case ... of ... end

";" Has two roles: separating different function clauses:

  fac(0) -> 1;
  fac(N) -> N * fac(N-1).

  if X < 0   -> neg;
     X > 0   -> pos;
     X == 0  -> zero
  end

  if X < 0   -> neg
   ; X > 0   -> pos
   ; X == 0  -> zero
  end

So as you can see, "." is for Forms, and ",;" are for separating language constructs/expressions. This is why You can see an if expression's 'end' done the three following ways: 'end.', 'end,' and 'end;'. Depending on where the expression is, it will be followed by different stuff.

You need to see it more like a template you can fill in than "here, let me put an end to this line!":

  head1(Args) [Guard] ->
      Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN;
  head2(Args) [Guard] ->
      Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN;
  headN(Args) [Guard] ->
      Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN.

Also, to put it in a C context, when you do:

    if (condition) 
       thing();
    else
       other_thing();