What are the best open source Erlang projects/files for a novice to read?

Question

I'm looking for some light reading. For those of you have far more Erlang experience than I, what are the best source files to read out on the web? If someone were going to learn correct Erlang/OTP principles only from reading raw source, what code should he start with and where should he go beyond that for a deep and advanced understanding?

Answer 1

I have started with Getting Started with Erlang. Nice round-up about basic language characteristics and concurrency model. Also quite good paper is A History of Erlang, because I like to explore what roots language has.

I'm currently interested in CouchDB, so I started with going through its source. It might not be good for start, but I'm curious how it works.

Answer 2

I think that the following tutorial has a quite realistic application following OTP practices.

A fast web server demonstrating some undocumented Erlang features

But I might be biased since I continued work on it to meet some actual needs I had, the project is called 'iserve'. But other people have used it as study material, see pokingarounderlang on iserve.

Answer 3

eTap actually is a good overview of some of the basic concepts but not too complicated to follow. It has a service and sends messages, outputs formatted data, and does interesting things.

If you want to learn how to do OTP then your best bet is probably MochiWeb. It's a little more advanced but it has a full OTP setup with supervisors/gen_servers and would be a good overview of how a general OTP system is setup.

Answer 4

Did you see the page http://beebole.com/erlang ?

It contains:

• how to setup an Erlang environment(with Mochiweb) on Ubuntu

• how to install the Nginx web server

• a video tutorial to build a small web app using Erlang

Answer 5

I personally like to browse YAWS and ejabberd: both provide some interesting techniques and can be tinkered with being modular.