Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Another short discussion about networks


Before we go further, we should take a moment to talk about networking and more specifically, about network topologies.

Fortunately, OTP doesn't really require us to know a lot about the TCP/IP stack or the OSI model of networking. In fact, OTP abstracts away most of the difficulties with networking—remote calls are identical to local calls. Even if a raw TCP socket is desired, the default mode for the socket will be to marshal the data packets as messages to the controlling process. That is, the OTP process that owns the socket will be given regular messages as TCP data is received.

Topologies

There are several standard topology models that exist today. There is the line, bus, ring, star, tree, mesh, mesh ring, and crossbar topologies.

Knowing the topologies isn't entirely required for building distributed applications. The usefulness of knowing topologies really shows when attempting to optimize network traffic. Furthermore, knowing the layout of nodes...