If you’ve heard folks talking about Erlang, but aren’t sure what it is, or haven’t had time to investigate, ONLamp offers up a great introduction in An Introduction to Erlang by Gregory Brown.

Erlang is known for an extremely elegant concurrency model. I’ve always been one to cringe at the mention of things like mutex locks, race conditions, and the entire motley crew of conceptual baggage that typically come along with any sort of parallel programming.

Joe Armstrong claims in “Programming Erlang” that because Erlang is designed from the ground up for concurrency, it makes life a lot easier. This, along with the promise of a small, efficient,and well thought out language implementation was enough to get me interested.

He starts with the classic “Hello World” and quickly moves up from there.