Who This Book Is For

Each adoption story has many actors, and many of them have broadly different roles and responsibilities. Our book cuts across all adoption stories.

Such a book will have many different types of readers, and no single reader will find everything covered here relevant to them. Team leads and technical managers will want to know how to recruit and train, but pure programmers will probably find such details distracting. Beginners from traditional languages like Java or Ruby will crave more information on making the transition to a more functional, concurrent language.

We decided to write this book anyway, because the information is important right now for the greater community. We hope you’ll agree.

Still, this book is not for everyone. If you’re the type of reader who is likely to be frustrated when you find content that is not specifically for you, we don’t think you’ll be happy. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has the biggest selection of Elixir books in the industry and we’ll gladly help you find one that’s right for you, but you may want to pass on this one.

If you are a CTO looking for a book to help you build a business case for using Elixir, we don’t believe such a book exists. The first couple of chapters will introduce you to a few stories that you may find instructive, with some hints toward financial justifications beyond “It scales well.” But in the end, we decided we did not want to build a full business case in this book. This book may help some technical managers who code, but is probably not for the C-level executive.

We’re writing this book for those in the technical Elixir community who find themselves adopting Elixir (or who plan to in the near future). Look, Elixir adoption can be hard because the collective problems we’re solving are demanding. It’s a functional, concurrent, distributed language. Any one of those concepts is difficult to understand. Many of our readers will be learning all of them at once. Have courage, though. We also know that many teams are making the successful transition.

Our combined experience suggests there is a growing segment of Elixir programmers who need to walk with successful Elixir practitioners. That list includes day-to-day developers looking for help making the transition from other languages. Experienced programmers may be deploying their solution from the experimental staging servers into production for the first time, or learning to scale their solution, or beginning to dabble in distribution for better fault tolerance. We can’t promise you’ll like everything in this book, but we can guarantee that you’ll find something you’ll like, something you’ve not seen before.