Erlang and Elixir for Imperative Programmers

Learn and understand Erlang and Elixir and develop a working knowledge of the concepts of functional programming that underpin them. This book takes the author’s experience of taking on a project that required functional programming and real-time systems, breaks it down, and organizes it. You will get the necessary knowledge about differences to the languages you know, where to start, and where to go next.

Have you been told by your customer or manager that they heard good things about Erlang, you should use it for the next project? Never had to deal with functional programming or real-time systems? In 2014, the author, Wolfgang Loder, developed a repository for digital assets that had to deliver those assets in binary form quickly and reliably, being able to deal with at least hundreds of requests per second.

Since he could decide the architecture and software stack of the solution, he immediately thought of Erlang and its libraries and started to evaluate this option. It was not long after that he discovered Elixir, which sits on top of the Erlang virtual machine and has features more palatable for non-functional programmers, although it is a functional programming language itself.

Erlang and Elixir for Imperative Programmers gives you a basis for deciding whether the effort is viable for your next project. This book is partly a tale of the author’s own experience and partly a description of the bigger and more subtle differences between Erlang/Elixir and languages such as C++, Java, and C#.

What You’ll Learn

• Discover functional programming, Erlang, and Elixir
• Work on service design and service features
• Set up your environment: deployment, development, and production
• Implement the service including public interface, asset processing, and deployment
• Use the patterns and concepts found in Erlang including type creation concepts and code structuring.

Who This Book Is For

Experienced and savvy programmers, coders, and developers new to Erlang and Elixir.

Table of Contents

Part I: Before We Start
Chapter 1: Imperative vs. Functional Programming
Chapter 2: From Erlang to Elixir
Chapter 3: Setting Your Mind

Part II: The Service
Chapter 4: Service Overview and Design
Chapter 5: Service Features

Part III: The Setup
Chapter 6: Environment and Deployment
Chapter 7: Development Setup
Chapter 8: Production Setup

Part IV: Implementing the Service
Chapter 9: Overview
Chapter 10: Public Interface
Chapter 11: Asset Processing
Chapter 12: Deployment

Part V: Patterns and Concepts
Chapter 13: Overview Patterns and Concepts
Chapter 14: Functional Concepts
Chapter 15: Type Creation Concepts
Chapter 16: Code Structuring Concepts

Appendix A: Modeling
Appendix B: Resources
Appendix C: Features/Framework/Concepts Matrix
Appendix D: Quick Guide to Erlang and Elixir