Hi, @Nopp and welcome to the community!

I won’t be able to give you a specific answer for your questions about learning functional programming in general and your questions about BEAM, but I can share some of my thoughts on learning Elixir.

My approach to learning Elixir has been to read books and do practical exercises. I can recommend Programming Elixir and Programming Phoenix to get a flying start.

If you are completely new to programming (depending on your current level), you might want to check out Learn Functional Programming with Elixir before you move on to Programming Elixir. I have not read this book myself, so I cannot personally vouch for it, but I have heard good things about it.

Since The Pragmatic Bookshelf is one of our community sponsors, you can get a generous 35% discount on those books and others by using the coupon code: ElixirForum

I also listen to these three podcasts: ElixirTalk, Elixir Outlaws and Elixir Mix. I have found that listening to experienced developers talk about their way of thinking when solving problems is very beneficial to my learning process, as it help me to “think like an Elixir developer.”

Other than that, I like to share my thoughts and experiments on this forum to get feedback.

Different people learn more effectively by different methods, so I’m not sure whether this approach would work for you. This is just my preferred approach to learning.

Welcome to Elixir!

1. I’d suggest you go through Elixir for Programmers or Programming Elixir. The latter has a lot of exercises which is a great thing to do if your programming experience is limited. After that, I’d suggest Elixir in Action to understand the power of BEAM.
2. Yes, BEAM is the VM required for Elixir (Elixir+BEAM is like Scala+JVM, just better!). When you’re going to release your software, you’d probably use something like Distillery that will package BEAM and your code as one deployment unit. Or you might want to use PaaS like Gigalixir where everything is taken care for you.

Hey @Nopp welcome!

Let me see if I can address your questions:

1. I personally feel like https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir is the best introduction to the language for folks who are newer to programming. It has a very gentle learning curve, and has lots of little examples to work with.

2. The vast majority of programs written in Elixir / Erlang run on something like a server, they are not generally programs that people install and run on their individual computers. That said, there are basically two ways you can run Elixir programs: compiled and run on the same computer, and as a packaged release.

• Compiled / Run in the same computer: For development work, you’ll want to have erlang and Elixir installed on your computer in full so that you can compile and run the code that you write. Personally I’m a fan of using https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf to get these installed.

• As a release: Once you’ve got a working program you can build what’s called a release. A release is a self contained package that includes your compiled code AND the BEAM. This means that if you go put this on your server you can execute it even if the server does not have the BEAM installed at all! Here’s the catch: The operating system that you run the package on needs to match the operating system it was built on.

Elixir is a fantastic backend for really any language. It’s been the case for a while now that the clients and servers use some sort of standard API to communicate, so you can pair basically any language on the client side and any language on the server side, it doesn’t much matter.

These are languages that run on the client side actually. They’re run in the web browser and talk back to the server, they aren’t languages that run serverside.

That’s probably it’s most common use case. Erlang (also on the BEAM) is perhaps best known for being a control layer in telecommunication systems. It’s also the language used to power the chat service WhatsApp which has over a billion users.

@stefanchrobot Thanks for your answer. In my excitement i directly purchased this course: The Complete Elixir and Phoenix Bootcamp (Udemy/self-published) without any knowledge of it, besides the ratings.
I hope it’s good. The price is way down than normal, so…

Thanks for your answers. I have to read a lot through the Elixir related stuff, like Distillery, Gigalixir etc.