Ever since the start of Extreme Forge in March we have intended to
offer Erlang training in Paris and in french. With an increasingly
active local community, as well as several prospects considering a
pilot project, the time seems ripe.
Registration is therefore open for our first Erlang
foundation course from November 14 to 18 2011.
Apart from teaching the course in french, we have designed it with two
ingredients that we think should make it interesting.
The first novelty is inspired by noticing that while books and
traditional Erlang courses start by teaching the concurrency
primitives (spawn, ! and receive), these are not used in any serious
projects. In fact, they are usually banned by coding guidelines, and
the project uses the OTP framework to achieve high concurrency
safely. But OTP is usually considered too complex and is kept for
advanced books and courses.
We have decided to do it the other way round and to begin teaching
concurrent programming using OTP gen_servers. This way, after a first
5-day course, participants can join a team using Erlang/OTP and be
immediately operational. We are saving Erlang’s concurrency primitives
for the advanced course we are planning!
It also appears to us that not only is Erlang attracting a lot of
interest from the Web application world, but even non-Web projects are
likely to have at least a Web-based administration GUI. So, with the
same concern getting students to be immediately operational, our
course will include a complete guide to making a Web app using the
LYME stack (Linux, Yaws, Mnesia, Erlang).
The other idea we’ve had for this course is to use our Agile Cup
programming contest engine to spice things up. Each part of the course
will have corresponding coding exercises, in the form of a progessive
series of tests to pass with the contest engine. In addition to making
the practicals more enjoyable, it’s a way for us to combine teaching
Erlang with teaching something else we strongly believe in,
test-driven development (TDD).
Finally, this course is an opportunity to reinforce our collaboration
with our friends from /ut7 with whom we enjoy working. They will be
hosting the course, as well as helping us improve the content and the
exercises.
Check out the details of the course, and sign up
quickly!