Book excerpt: Summary Revised and updated for Elixir 1.7, Elixir in Action, Second Edition teaches you how to apply Elixir to practical problems associated with scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability. Along the way, you'll develop an appreciation for, and considerable skill in, a functional and concurrent style of programming. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology When you're building mission-critical software, fault tolerance matters. The Elixir programming language delivers fast, reliable applications, whether you're building a large-scale distributed system, a set of backend services, or a simple web app. And Elixir's elegant syntax and functional programming mindset make your software easy to write, read, and maintain. About the Book Elixir in Action, Second Edition teaches you how to build production-quality distributed applications using the Elixir programming language. Author Saša Jurić introduces this powerful language using examples that highlight the benefits of Elixir's functional and concurrent programming. You'll discover how the OTP framework can radically reduce tedious low-level coding tasks. You'll also explore practical approaches to concurrency as you learn to distribute a production system over multiple machines. What's inside Updated for Elixir 1.7 Functional and concurrent programming Introduction to distributed system design Creating deployable releases About the Reader You'll need intermediate skills with client/server applications and a language like Java, C#, or Ruby. No previous experience with Elixir required. About the Author Saša Jurić is a developer with extensive experience using Elixir and Erlang in complex server-side systems. Table of Contents First steps Building blocks Control flow Data abstractions Concurrency primitives Generic server processes Building a concurrent system Fault-tolerance basics Isolating error effects Beyond GenServer Working with components Building a distributed system Running the system