This is the beginning of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! Reading this tutorial should be one of your first steps in learning Erlang, so let's talk about it a bit.
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First of all, I began growing the idea of writing this after reading Miran Lipovača's Learn You a Haskell for great Good! (LYAH) tutorial; I thought he did a great job making the language attractive and the learning experience friendly. As I already knew him, I asked him how he felt about me writing an Erlang version of his book. He liked the idea, being somewhat interested in Erlang.

So here I am typing this. Of course there were other sources to my motivation: I mainly find the entry to the language to be hard (the web has sparse documentation and otherwise you need to buy books), and I thought the community would benefit from a LYAH-like guide. Less importantly, I've seen people attributing Erlang too much or not enough merit sometimes based on sweeping generalizations. Then there are people who sure as hell believe Erlang is nothing but hype. If I'd like to convince them otherwise, I know they're not likely to read this in the first place.

This book thus wants itself to be a way to learn Erlang for people who have basic knowledge of programming in imperative languages (such as C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc) and may or may not know functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, OCaml...). I also want to write this book in a honest manner, selling Erlang for what it is, acknowledging its weaknesses and strengths.