I think there’s more than enough material for beginners. I’d like to see a distributed systems book that uses Elixir as its language. It’d have implementations of algorithms like Raft or solutions to say, Byzantine Generals.

In general, material that goes beyond making web apps would be nice.

Like Rust and some other languages are doing, maybe the community could start a dedicated website called like “The Book of Elixir”, say a github pages site, that everyone dedicates to that is willing to, which would contain the information that is not quite appropriate in the manuals, like how to code, why things are the way they are, how to use these interfaces best, different coding styles, etc… If we properly version the information in it, such as to mark a page/section/whatever as accurate for a given version and deprecate it on version change to where it has to be vetted again to be re-active and, for example, remove a warning on the page it may be inaccurate, that would probably be a good start. I’ve seen other communities do quite well on their books, and @AstonJ could give extra tickets in his monthly things for people that submit content. There are many ways it could be pushed along.

Using a decent static site generator then could even generate PDF’s and so forth as well. Could use disqus or something to let people submit comments they have questions about so the book can be further fleshed out over time as well, or perhaps just link each page to a github issue in the book repo with an auto-filled out template for the given page. Lots of options.

Right on.

What we need are more real world books. Don’t get me wrong. I love the inspirational “Elixir is great…Elixir rocks…Elixir does x easier” books and articles, but what really really matters is how do we do REAL WORLD things in Elixir.

We need a book that talks about the hard stuff: Deployments, networks, distribution, scaling, testing, logging, metrics, and real failure. It’s nice that all the books we have tell us that we CAN do all those things, but how are companies like Bleacher Report handling these topics.

I’ve talked to Steven Proctor in the past about him and I setting up a conference here in Dallas, TX to interview real Erlang/Elixir developers that have successfully dealt with these real world issues. It would be awesome to see a book that really dove into those subjects.

Now, that being said, I’m only halfway finished with Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP. That book may have everything I said above, but I’ve got a feeling it still isn’t in depth as we SHOULD get.

It’s one thing to read some examples, and it’s another thing having someone experienced tell you, “It’s not all Rainbows and Sunshine, but don’t worry because I’m going to show you the hard things you’re going to run into and how to overcome them”.