Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Elixir in Action, Third Edition.

This is an intermediate level book that teaches about Elixir, Erlang, and how they assist the development of highly available server-side systems. To fully take advantage of the material, you should be an experienced software developer. It is not expected that you know anything about Elixir, Erlang, or functional programming, but you should be skillful in at least one programming language, such as Java, C#, Ruby, JavaScript.

A lot of work has been invested into making the contents approachable, and the learning process incremental. The first part of the book discusses the functional aspect of Elixir. Going forward, in the second part you'll learn about concurrent Elixir, and how it can help you improve scalability and fault-tolerance of your systems. Finally, the third part of the book deals with the production-related topics, such as distributed systems and deployable releases.

It's been four years since the second edition of this book has been published, and Elixir has moved forward in that period. This edition discusses some new language features, updates the deprecated parts, and polishes the example code, so it's more idiomatic and aligned with the latest best practices.

As you're reading, I encourage you to take advantage of Manning’s Livebook discussion forum and post your questions and comments there. Feedback is highly appreciated and helps me make this book better.