About The BEAM Book
The BEAM Book is Erik Stenman's practical reference for understanding the Erlang runtime system: processes, scheduling, memory, garbage collection, distribution, and the machinery behind Erlang and Elixir systems.
Read it when you need to understand why a BEAM system behaves the way it does under load.
What You'll Learn
- BEAM Architecture: Deep dive into the virtual machine's design and implementation
- Process Management: How BEAM handles millions of lightweight processes
- Memory Management: Garbage collection and memory optimization strategies
- Fault Tolerance: The supervisor tree and "let it crash" philosophy
- Performance Tuning: Profiling and optimizing BEAM applications
- Advanced Topics: Hot code loading, distribution, and clustering
What Runtime Understanding Gives You
BEAM systems behave differently from ordinary request-and-thread backends. The runtime gives you lightweight processes, message passing, supervision, distribution, and isolation. Those tools are powerful only when you understand what the VM is actually doing.
Community Feedback
Book Details
- Pages: 400+
- Publisher: HappiHacking AB
- ISBN: 978-1718503915
- Format: Paperback, eBook, PDF
- Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Get Your Copy
Printed copies are temporarily out of stock through HappiHacking. Please order the paperback from Amazon for now.
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/9153142535
- Online version: https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/
What People Are Saying
"I kept going because I wanted to understand the BEAM properly." There's value in following the real logic, not just the surface explanations.
- elric, Hacker News
A must-read for any #erlang or #elixirlang developer.
- @lucianparvu
Recent discussion reminded me about this great book on lower-level working of ERTS/BEAM by @erik_stenman. Highly recommended; I'll reread it myself :-)
- @sasajuric
The information in this book has proven invaluable to better understand process scheduling, garbage collection and memory allocators and greatly improve the performance of RabbitMQ, both through more efficient algorithms and better VM configuration.
- Loïc Hoguin, author of Cowboy (and other Erlang tools)
Really enjoying the BEAM Book...
- Mike Hostetler
Referencing @erik_stenman's BEAM expertise
- Code BEAM SF
Probably the Beam Book is one of the best resources that every elixir develop should read to understand the BEAM vm.
- Carlo Gilmar
I believe there are at least two resources that are a must for Elixir developers: the first one is Joe Armstrong's thesis, and the second one is the BEAM book.
- Carlo Gilmar
Have read the Beam Book - it helps to understand how BEAM VM works, and how to use it better.
- Roman Kotov
