What do you think?
Rate this book
The BEAM Book: Understanding the Erlang Runtime System
Unlock the Power of the BEAM Virtual Machine.
The BEAM Book is the definitive guide to understanding Erlang’s runtime system, the BEAM VM. Whether you’re an Erlang developer, Elixir enthusiast, or a systems architect, this book takes you deep into the internals of the Erlang RunTime System (ERTS)—the technology powering some of the most reliable and scalable systems in the world.
Inside, you'll explore:
✔ BEAM internals – How the virtual machine executes and optimizes Erlang code
✔ Process scheduling – How lightweight concurrency and distribution work under the hood
✔ Memory management – Garbage collection, heap allocation, and efficiency tuning
✔ Debugging and profiling – Tools and techniques to analyze BEAM performance
This book is for developers, system engineers, and anyone curious about what makes BEAM so unique. Whether you want to optimize applications, debug performance bottlenecks, or simply gain a deeper understanding of functional language runtimes, The BEAM Book is your essential resource.
Perfect for anyone working with Erlang, Elixir, or BEAM-based systems.
The BEAM Book is the definitive guide to understanding Erlang’s runtime system, the BEAM VM. Whether you’re an Erlang developer, Elixir enthusiast, or a systems architect, this book takes you deep into the internals of the Erlang RunTime System (ERTS)—the technology powering some of the most reliable and scalable systems in the world.
Inside, you'll explore:
✔ BEAM internals – How the virtual machine executes and optimizes Erlang code
✔ Process scheduling – How lightweight concurrency and distribution work under the hood
✔ Memory management – Garbage collection, heap allocation, and efficiency tuning
✔ Debugging and profiling – Tools and techniques to analyze BEAM performance
This book is for developers, system engineers, and anyone curious about what makes BEAM so unique. Whether you want to optimize applications, debug performance bottlenecks, or simply gain a deeper understanding of functional language runtimes, The BEAM Book is your essential resource.
Perfect for anyone working with Erlang, Elixir, or BEAM-based systems.
469 pages, Paperback
First published May 23, 2025
12 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 10, 2025
I was conflicted between giving a 3 or a 4.
The books goes really deep into some really really weird subjects concerning the beam which would probably be of use to the maintainers.
I found the chapter about schedulers as well as the one about message passing and the ones about Ports, NIF's to be the gems of this book, not covered in such depth in any other book. That being said the drawings were bad, the schemas were hard to digest for some reason...some of them just plain blocks put one next to another while they were actually used in succession...I found these drawings really daunting (especially those explaining the different process memories - heap, stack , and the N m-buf blocks).
I think this book needs a bit more polishing on the schematic part, a bit more attention to core chapters like message passing , schedulers and the beam structure.
Most of the info here you will find in Cessarini's book but there are still some things to be learned in here too.
The books goes really deep into some really really weird subjects concerning the beam which would probably be of use to the maintainers.
I found the chapter about schedulers as well as the one about message passing and the ones about Ports, NIF's to be the gems of this book, not covered in such depth in any other book. That being said the drawings were bad, the schemas were hard to digest for some reason...some of them just plain blocks put one next to another while they were actually used in succession...I found these drawings really daunting (especially those explaining the different process memories - heap, stack , and the N m-buf blocks).
I think this book needs a bit more polishing on the schematic part, a bit more attention to core chapters like message passing , schedulers and the beam structure.
Most of the info here you will find in Cessarini's book but there are still some things to be learned in here too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review