Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir

What Hacker News says

1. JtsummersSep 2025
   Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. It spends a lot of time on how to introduce testability into existing software systems that were not designed for testing.

   Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir by Fred Hebert. While a book about a particular tool (PropEr) and pair of languages (Erlang and Elixir), it's a solid introduction to property-based testing. The techniques described transfer well to other PBT systems and other languages.

   Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck.

   https://www.fuzzingbook.org/ by Zeller et al. and https://www.debuggingbook.org/ by Andreas Zeller. The latter is technically about debugging, but it has some specific techniques that you can incorporate into how you test software. Like Delta Debugging, also described in a paper by Zeller et al. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=988....

   I'm not sure of other books I can recommend, the rest I know is from learning on the job or studying specific tooling and techniques.

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2. RendelloOct 2024
   Niche, but the book Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir [1] taught me a lot. It might be the only dead-tree book on PBT. If you don't know what it is, here's a short video on it [2], it's basically a tool to automate tests and automatically simplify (shrink) the failing cases.

   1. https://propertesting.com/

   2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfaNEebCDos

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3. JtsummersDec 2023
   More towards the advanced side I'd recommend Fred Hebert's Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir - https://pragprog.com/titles/fhproper/property-based-testing-...

   It's also one of the best resources I've come across on property-based testing and is something I recommend to non-Erlang/Elixir programmers as well.

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4. JtsummersNov 2022
   I really liked Hebert's Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir. It's in Erlang and Elixir, but the concepts transfer well to other languages and property-based test systems.

   https://pragprog.com/titles/fhproper/property-based-testing-...

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5. zellsterOct 2022
   Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin

   Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir by Fred Herbert

   Hacker's Delight by Henry Warren

   Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley

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6. dharamgollapudiSep 2022
   While most of these resources could be still valuable, to avoid buyer's remorse, pay attention to the publishing dates, as some of them are very dated:

   2022 - $18.95 - Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves

   2022 - $18.95 - Build a Binary Clock with Elixir and Nerves

   2022 - $15.00 - Programmer Passport: OTP

   2022 - $15.00 - Programmer Passport: Elixir

   2021 - $27.95 - Testing Elixir

   2021 - $26.95 - Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir

   2021 - $22.95 - Genetic Algorithms in Elixir

   2020 - $27.95 - Real-Time Phoenix

   2019 - $26.95 - Programming Ecto

   2019 - $28.95 - Programming Phoenix 1.4 (Current version is 1.6)

   2019 - $26.95 - Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir

   2019 - $24.95 - Designing Elixir Systems with OTP

   2018 - $27.95 - Programming Elixir 1.6 (Current version is 1.14)

   2018 - $27.95 - Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe

   2018 - $26.95 - Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix

   2018 - $24.95 - Learn Functional Programming with Elixir

   2018 - $24.95 - Adopting Elixir

   2015 - $11.00 - Metaprogramming Elixir

   2014 - $27.95 - Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

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