Programming Tutorials

Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Erlang

Last Updated on August 17, 2024

Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional programming language and runtime environment developed by Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services. Erlang is dynamically typed and has a pattern matching syntax. The language solves difficult problems inherent in parallel, concurrent environments. It uses sets of parallel supervised processes, not a single sequential process as found in most programming languages.

Erlang was created in 1986 at the Ellemtel Telecommunication Systems Laboratories for telecommunication systems. The objective was to build a simple and efficient programming language resilient large-scale concurrent industrial applications.

Besides telecommunication systems and applications and other large industrial real-time systems, Erlang is particularly suitable for servers for internet applications, e-commerce, and networked database applications. The versatility of the language is, in part, due to its extensive collection of libraries.

The language is released under an open source license, initially the Erlang Public License, now supplanted by the Apache License 2.0.

Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Erlang. If you’re looking for free Erlang programming books, check here.


1. Getting Started with Erlang by Ericsson AB

As its name suggests, this book is a “kick start” tutorial to get you up and running with Erlang.

It tells only the simplest form of the syntax, simplifies material, and omits things like references, local error handling, and single direction lines. But it’s a great place to begin your adventures with the language.

Read the tutorial


2. tryerlang.org

tryerlang.org is a hands-on, interactive tutorial that allows you to try the power of Erlang directly in your browser, without installing anything on your machine.

Access the tutorial


3. Erlang tutorial for PHP developers by Marcelo Gornstein

This article is intended for PHP developers that want to understand and start learning and coding Erlang applications.

Read the tutorial


4. Learn Erlang by Fred Hebert

This tutorial uses a somewhat fun application to get up and running from a basic Erlang app that can be run within a module, to a proper OTP library that can be included by other projects, to a release than can be self-executing and distributed to client’s computer, or on a server.

Read the tutorial


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Trent Calder
Trent Calder
4 years ago

Does anyone use Erlang any more?