Is there a rigorous general introduction to event-based programming in textbook or monograph form?

Question

I've been looking at the selection on Amazon and

"The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems" sounds like it has way too much fluff, but the other choices like:

"Event-Based Programming: Taking Events to the Limit" sound too much like a cookbook and tie you to particular frameworks in specific languages that are limited-domain, so it probably is shallow on general theoretical underpinnings.

"Distributed Event-Based Systems" is a Springer title, and is likely just reprints of a bunch of handwavy journal articles tangentially-related to event-based programming, judging by the other Springer books like it I've had the misfortune to buy, at ~$100 I don't see it as being good value.

Am I better off going with something like "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World", or perhaps another title that someone can recommend that's quite good yet general?

I want to actually develop an application that works reliably and is free of spaghetti code and understand what I'm doing above the level of cookbook examples for a particular framework but am not interested in proving theorems about the Pi calculus.

I have "Communicating Sequential Processes" by Hoare, but it's too abstract to help with an actual implementation unless I want to prove correctness afterwards, which isn't really my goal.

Answer 1

The Erlang book you're referring to deals with event driven programming, sure. But it doesn't deal that much with theory but more directly with implementing said stuff in Erlang.

That said, Erlang really is the ideal language to implement something like this in. The philosophy behind Erlang's distribution primitives, process communication and maybe most of all its error handling makes the implementation really robust and lightweight (both in lines of code as in easily readable).

I took a quick look inside the book in question and there is a chapter on distributed systems and the following chapter implements an IRC-like chat application using the stuff from that and other chapters.

Answer 2

take a look at gen_event:

http://spawnlink.com/articles/an-introduction-to-gen%5Fevent-account-notifications/

http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/gen%5Fevent.html

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Armstrong and Cesarini / Thompson books (both excellent) have short examples (about 1-page )