Going through these might clarify for which kind of programming the language is intended in the first place.
And I also recommend Logans book. OTP is an overlooked part in Erlang education although it is nowadays part of Erlang distribution and not a separable part!
I've read through most of Learn You Some Erlang and I have to say that the second half of the book really starts to break down. About the point where you start to build the concurrent application the author's descriptions of what's going on become hard to follow and in some cases are glossed over with some new elements being left out entirely.
I was a little disappointed by the tutorial overall. Although the functional programming portion (first half) is quite good; well written and easy to follow.
I'm still looking for a great introductory text for Erlang.
Good stuff - very succinct. But... the basics of Erlang are very straightforward and tutorials are plentiful. There really should be more articles on the things that set Erlang apart (OTP design principles etc) written in the style of this article.
UPDATE: One of the reasons I'm not writing aforementioned articles is my inability to convey what I mean. What I really meant to say: "Very succinct. The articles this guy will produce in the future will be very beneficial to the community."
Erlang is about concurrency and message-passing, so for my first exercise I’m going to try to create some simple network services.
Create some simple toy services that use raw message passing, just to get familiar with how things work at a low level. But when you get ready to do anything production-grade, or even find yourself thinking about things like "how do I ensure all my processes get started before I start trying to send messages" start learning OTP. A great tool for generating skeleton OTP applications and helping with a lot of the associated housekeeping is rebar.
The book by Martin Logan, mentioned in another comment, is a great primer on OTP once you have the basics of Erlang under your belt.
Ah, assign only once. It's as if thousands of COBOL programmers cried out at once and then were suddenly extinguished :-) ("Bastards! What did you do with the DATA DIVISION!!!")
Good catch about symbols (variables) starting with caps, vs unquoted atoms starting with lowers. I've skimmed the Prag.Prog. Erlang book, but did not pay close enough attention to catch it.
Now if only I could really get my head around monads... (at least I got to study another language with lists and atoms back at school in the 80s, though it wasn't covered very well at CSUS)
Learning:
http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
and also
"Erlang and OTP in Action" by Martin Logan,et. al.
http://www.manning.com/logan/
Web REPL:
http://www.tryerlang.org/
Community:
http://www.planeterlang.org/
http://www.trapexit.org/