The printed version of this book and the eBook will be available in November/December 2016 from Apress.

In 2014 I started to develop an application for a Kenyan startup. Basically it is a repository for digital assets and one requirement is to deliver those assets in binary form quickly and reliably, being able to deal with at least hundreds of requests per second.

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

This book gives you a basis for deciding yourself if the effort is viable for your next project. It is partly a tale of my own experience, partly a description of the bigger and more subtle differences between Erlang/Elixir to languages like C++, Java or C#.