Name: Elixir in action
ISBN: 9781617292019

Elixir in action

Summary Elixir in Action teaches you to apply the new Elixir programming language to practical problems associated with scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Elixir is a modern programming language that takes advantage of BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine, without the burden of Erlang's complex syntax and conventions. Elixir gives you Ruby-like elegance with the power to develop bulletproof distributed server systems that can handle massive numbers of simultaneous clients and run with almost no downtime. About the Book Elixir in Action teaches you how to solve practical problems of scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability using Elixir. You'll start with the language, learning basic constructs and building blocks. Then, you'll learn to think about problems using Elixir's functional programming mindset. With that solid foundation, you'll confidently explore Elixir's seamless integration with BEAM and Erlang's powerful OTP framework of battle-tested abstractions you can use immediately. Finally, the book provides guidance on how to distribute a system over multiple machines and control it in production. Requires no previous experience with Elixir, Erlang, or the OTP. Written for readers who are familiar with another programming language like Ruby, JavaScript, or C#.

What Hacker News says

bmitcMay 2026

There are a lot of good books here: https://pragprog.com/categories/architecture-design-and-test...

I second the comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327571) recommending How to Design Programs (HTDP) and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). The former has an edX course (https://www.edx.org/learn/coding/university-of-british-colum... and https://www.edx.org/learn/coding/university-of-british-colum...) and the latter has online lectures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...)

Head First Architecture (https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Software-Architecture-Arch...) is good.

Reading about systems thinking would be useful.

Learning programming languages that have been well designed is helpful. I suggest Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World and Elixir in Action.

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_accoOct 2025

I disagree. I started with Elixir and its OTP resources are really good. Books like Elixir in Action do a great job.

I read Programming Erlang later, but it was just for fun, and I knew most things already at that point.

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pixelmonkeySep 2025

I just did a small programming side project with a friend in Elixir and I was pretty impressed with the language, especially how it approaches functional programming, concurrency, parallelism, and “programming in the large” (e.g. networked systems and clusters).

I still think there’d be some sort of mental hurdle for me to consider using it for a project of the kinds described on WeUseElixir (vs my go-to language of Python).

But simply toying around with a concrete example of a concrete “word count” program scaled up to multi-core and multi-node made me “get” Elixir a lot more.

Also, I highly recommend this podcast interview with the author of “Elixir in Action.” He does a really nice job describing what makes Erlang and Elixir unique vs other commonly used backend programming languages.

https://se-radio.net/2018/08/se-radio-336-sasa-juric-on-elix...

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nesarkvechnepJan 2025

Yes, two books. To get a feel for the language - “Elixir in Action” by Sasa Juric. To discover how Elixir and the platform it’s built on excel in scalability and fault-tolerance - “Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP” by Francesco Cesarini.

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cess11Jun 2024

Boot up a Livebook and step through some of the basics on the Elixir homepage. Someone else recommended Elixir in Action, which is a very good book once you have some grasp on the fundamentals.

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skydhashMay 2024

Shadow libraries did more to democratize anything than LLMs. And following a book like Elixir in Action (Manning) will get you there faster than chatting with LLMs or copilot generating code for you.

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