just dropping my two cents, I did not enjoy the pick axe, and when I turned to learn erlang I was essentially weighing two options: Pragmatic Bookshelf's erlang book and O'Reilly Media's erlang book. I chose O'Reilly's because I didn't want a long winded tutorial, I want the feature list gradually shown to me in order of complexity so I can jump into my own project without having to build the outlined in a book. The C++ langauge tutorial on cplusplus.com is also written this way, it presents the language's funtionalities in order of complexity.