I learn by doing much more than by reading or listening, so as I go through O’Reilly’s Erlang Programming, I take the exercises at the end seriously. Generally, when I learn a new programming language, while I read, I’ll make a program of my own choosing, perhaps something that will be useful to me or that I could sell. However, with Erlang, I don’t even know where to begin using it yet. I want to get really, really good at it before I even attempt to make anything with it (I think remembering the mistakes I made with my first Ruby on Rails project caused this shift in attitude.. and let’s not forget the triumphs of reading Mastering Regular Expressions in its entirety).

I will be posting my attempts at the exercises, in case others might find it useful or seasoned Erlang programmers might tell me what I may be doing wrong. I’ll be spacing out my answers to chapter 3 over the week to keep things interesting. Here are the first three exercises from Chapter 3:
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