[throwaway81523]

Erlang the language is pretty simple. What takes some grokking is first, the concurrency approach; and second, the OTP library. If you're used to Golang or using Python with threads communicating through Queues, Erlang works about the same way, with the additional feature that a process exiting also kills its parent unless the parent explicitly traps the exit signal. In OTP parlance, a process that traps exit is called a supervisor, since its usual function is to restart the crashed process.

Learn You Some Erlang has some useful discussion of OTP, and it was a big help to me to read through the OTP library source code. That of course will also get you more comfortable with Erlang itself.

[hazbo]

I think Erlang's concurrency model is quite a bit different to the likes of Go (and probably most other languages). With Go you still have to worry about shared memory and have to manage that correctly when using Go routines. In Erlang, there is no shared memory with processes. Parallel processes are completely independent, they have their own stack and heap, and so the only way one process is able to share or access data to/from another process is through message passing.

[throwaway81523]

I haven't used Go all that much, but in Python I try to write in a style that avoids any mutable objects accessed by more than one thread. All communication is through queues and I tend to have a simple RPC scheme sending callables through the queues. This has always worked pretty well for me.