Books
Programming Erlang, by Joe Armstrong. A good book, really teaching you more about the fundamentals of Erlang and how the abstractions are built. Some people found it a bit dry and hard to follow. Joe Armstrong is the original creator of Erlang, along with Robert Virding and Mike Williams
Erlang Programming, by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson. This book is often suggested along with Joe Armstrong's book. It's got the approach of Software engineers and contains more tips about debugging software, maintaining it, profiling, tracing, etc. Whether you prefer this book or Joe's book is usually pretty personal.
Concurrent programming in ERLANG, by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, Claes Wilström and Mike Williams. This is an old out of print book from the 1996, pretty rare and costs a lot of money. It was commissioned by Nokia [citation needed]. Back then, Erlang was still closed source. Even though it shows the bases real quick, It is considered it an advanced book for the chapters 11 and 12, which basically encompass a few of Erlang's many clever algorithms for handling distributed processing and distributed data (including how to implement transactions for a database and whatnot). You can still get the first part online for free, which will guide you through the basics, although they should be not be used as a learning source for a newcomer.
There are few other books, either not yet released or that few people have read (yet):
- Erlang and OTP in Action, by Martin Logan, Eric Merritt, and Richard Carlsson, planned for July 2010. There's a review edition currently available;
- Erlang Web Applications: Problem - Design - Solutions, by Nick Gerakines, planned for August 2010;
- Mastering Erlang: Writing Real World Applications, by Geoff Cant, was planned for March 2010, only review copies are out at the moment. Seems to have been pushed back to August 2010. Amazon mentions it as deliverable, but the book can't be found on Apress' site.
There are a few other books which either mention Erlang or see it on the surface, but weren't included.
Online books
If you really want something very hands on, Erlang for Skeptics, by Luke Venediger can be recommended. The book is very short and Luke has been thinking of reworking it, but it's a very quick walkthrough.
Learn You Some Erlang for great good!, another incomplete online book.
Screencasts
Although screencasts aren't properly books or reading material for the matter, they were included here due to how few there are at the moment.
- Erlang in Practice, screencasts by Kevin Smith. He starts from scratch and makes you build a distributed chat application with mochiweb. Then you refactor it to use OTP behaviours and finally pack it up into an OTP application. It's worth it if you've got some experience already and are really looking at how to build stuff rather than references.