Why I wrote the BEAM book

Here is the link to the git repo - https://github.com/happi/theBeamBook

> I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly. There’s value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.

This resonates with me. That's the kind of drive that results in great output. Buying it just for that.

I've been approached by publishers several times throughout my career. Each time the process was similar: they had an idea, I had an idea, we tried to come to common ground, and then the deal fell through because we couldn't find any. E.g. I didn't want to write a Java book aimed at 14 year olds. They didn't want me to write about classloaders (or whatever niche subject I was diving into at the time).

Would love to learn how people find (non-empty) intersections of their passions & what readers want.

Learning to work on the BEAM with Erlang/OTP has been one of the best experiences I had in the past year, I used Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World" book (and highly recommend it to beginners), I also heard good things about "Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP" (but didn't start this one yet), but nothing comes close to this in terms of depth.

The BEAM really feels like alien tech left from a highly advanced civilization and this book dropped in a such a great timing! Bought it right away, kudos to Dr. Erik Stenman for keeping it up after two cancellations!

The BEAM might be the most under-rated tech in all of open source.

Example -- whatsapp.

Why Elixir + Erlang are not more popular for high concurrency projects is a mystery to me.

Elixir and BEAM are my all-time favorite choice for building networked or pipeline-heavy systems. I used it every day in production for several years, and while it’s a hard sell for recent projects (and generally the wrong call), I enjoy keeping up with it as much as I can.

Thank you for writing this book! I really wanted this a few years ago as I was debugging production Elixir, but existing learning sources were pretty dense and dry (or too simple and shallow).

"We will try to use the term Erlang Runtime System to refer to the general idea of any Erlang Runtime System as opposed to the specific implementation by Ericsson which we call the Erlang RunTime System or usually just ERTS."

Love it.

I guess I've never worked on something of Klarna's scale, but 15ms seems like a very small amount of time to cause a post-mortem-worthy event!

Bought it instantly, even if it’s available online for free I guess this way supports the author a little bit

This looks amazing purely from an engineer's perspective that wants to level up on something they have worked on for a while with enough understanding to build working systems with it. Just confirming, this is more useful for developers that have worked with Erlang/Beam correct? Not so useful for a Beam newcomer?

I keep hearing my marvelous promises about the BEAM, but the adoption is still so low. Why?

Are there any other VM's like the BEAM? I never heard of any (admittedly I know little of this subject), and I wondered, is it because there is no need for another one because the BEAM is just so good, or is it because the amount of work and skill required to get another BEAM-like runtime with comparable quality is too demanding?

> Issue #113 - “Please continue being awesome.” That emoji-laced drive-by encouragement (August 2018) still pops into my head whenever motivation dips.

This warms my heart. While the internet is infamous for its negativity and how it makes people miserable, even small positive moments like this can make a lasting difference and remain memorable years later.

Plenty of documentation can be found about the JVM, but BEAM has always seemed like a bit of a mystery to me. This is great!

Best guess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)

I’ve been watching erlang from afar for a few years. Here’s to hoping to actually get to work with it one day.

Books ask for a lot of organization in general. And books on an evolving subject never stop asking.

I don't use Erlang, but for 13 years in the making, I'm getting a copy.

Thank you.

p.s if the author sees this: Kindle edition too, please.

Oh I thought this was gonna be about BEAM as in https://smfr.org/robots/ ha ha.

TIL that Klarna runs on Erlang.

Thank you very much!

I've not used Erlang before (and naturally have not read the BEAM book); I mostly live in the world of C++ (and CUDA/OpenCL) these days. Would this be of interest to me?

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