[crabbone]

Regardless of the language, I found that the fastest (but not necessarily the least painful) way to learn a language is to join a project written in that language and try to contribute. This accomplishes multiple goals at the same time: seeing the usual tools and practices, seeing how larger projects are built, seeing where common problematic places are.

Some helpful things about understanding Erlang: having familiarity with Prolog. While languages work differently, on a syntactical level they have quite a few things in common. Knowing one helps to anticipate how things may work in the other in terms of syntax. You would also benefit from familiarity with persistent data types. Often the way data can be accessed defines more high-level decisions within application. Coming from the world of mutable data structures it's easy to get trapped in situations where you realize something is impossible to do the "usual" way. There are, well... "patterns" that emerged in Erlang that might be quite unique (eg. ports), but I wouldn't know about a source that accumulates and catalogues such patterns. Just know that Erlang has quite a few of those. Sometimes the word describing a function or a module wouldn't make sense to a new programmer, because the jargon has changed (eg. ports, again), pay attention to those case, they usually describe some "super-structure" in the code.

Finally, one more thing that I found that makes you understand the language better: writing native extensions. In this way you get very intimate and "first-hand" understanding of how some mechanisms work that cannot be properly exposed in the language itself.