Building Web Applications with Erlang: Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws

I bought this to learn about Yaws for an experiment that involved Yaws. So, I skimmed and referred to it as needed. Based on this, the book does not provide way more info than the online material available about Yaws.

First, my sincere thanks to Zachary for tackling the subject. Given the niche which Erlang occupies, and even a narrower niche of web applications built in Erlang, this is a good book to have.BEWARE: It's not a book to teach you web dev with Erlang in depth, but rather to whet your appetite. It merely scratches the surface, so make sure you set your expectations accordingly! I found lots of gaps to fill on my own as I worked through the examples.Even though I've read other Erlang books, this one has connected a few more dots for me, and that was worth the time and money!

If you already have a bit of background in Erlang and/or web apps this is a great book. If you are trying to learn both you will need something more basic but then this book doesn't claim to be all things to all people.

For a book that mentions on the front cover, "Working with REST and WebSockets on Yaws", the web sockets chapter was horrible. Not only was it 9 pages long, but the example doesn't compile. If you get the example to compile, it is still dead wrong. I'm not an authority on Erlang, but I don't even have to run the code to know that it's wrong. The example's logic is backwards when looking for an 'Upgrade' header in the HTTP request. The author commits several coding sins by using variable names such as 'K' or 'V' in his function parameters. Did the author run his own code? Was this example rushed? The advanced section of the web sockets chapter talks about fragmented messages and how to handle the start, middle, and end of the message. But it never lists what the "FragTypes" are. The author simply has an example on handling fragmented messages with a paragraph explaining what his example does. Being that his last example was dead wrong, how can I trust this one? Why couldn't he at least have a table or a visual explaining this.This book is meant for learning to write erlang server-side code. However, when it comes to the author's simple front-end example, he decides to use nothing but coffee script. Why can't it just be HTML with javascript? Now, I have to figure out how coffee script works. Another problem is that the author points out that the book is not meant to teach about OTP but when the book came to the OTP chapter, he starts describing in great detail what an application, supervisor, and gen_server is. I thought it would have been awesome if the author used rebar and eunit for this example but the last chapter just didn't feel very fulfilling.Other than those complaints, the book isn't too bad and it's a quick read. It's mediocre at best. The price is fair and, as far as I know, the only book out there on writing web apps using Erlang. All I'm saying is that if another book came out, it wouldn't be hard to top this one.

There was a time O'reilly books were trusted by developers' community for the quality of content. The new tech culture has led to recklessly publishing books to become a face in meetup crowds. I have safari online account and I read it there (it is not worth cutting a tree). The book is a sheer hodge-podge of things and it does not do justice to either Erlang or Web Application development. It chooses yaws as the web container so, the name should have been really Erlang with Yaws. In fact, it does not do justice to even yaws as the examples are sketchy at best and mostly do not work. On yaws, folks are better served reading the documentation at the yaws website.For a web application book one would expect a growth of project that explores various aspects of design concerns and their resolutions within the framework. I had expected a detailed discussion on the ways to use different databases (SQL, NoSQL) e.g. MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra etc. while providing a general guidance around structuring, performance monitoring etc.I resent nice reviews to such books as they are a disservice to the development community. One star for coming up with a title that can attract hapless developers to buy it.

Nice, gentle introduction to using Erlang to build web applications. After a few chapters, you'll be on the web yourself getting more in-depth coverage, as this book isn't about teaching Erlang, more about opening your mind to Erlang. Let the book open your mind to the huge increase in developer productivity that can be had from functional programming.

Received as specified, thank you.

Pros: shows you how to write some super basic yaws web apps. It's a great starter to read while also reading the online yaws docs.Cons: thin, 133 pages, with some fluff inside, and oddly lacking an index.* the authors chose to use a json encoder called rfc4627, but don't discuss why they chose that over the one that comes with yaws* it was a little unclear as to how to actually start writing a yaws application...even after reading the online docs, it took some emails to the yaws mailing list to straighten this out in my head* there seems to be no mention of common tools like rebar* no mention of other web servers, for example 'cowboy'You might want to glance at this one in a bookstore, if they still exist, before purchasing. I'm sure I'll refer to this as I get more into web programming with erlang.