The Elixir community owes a lot to Pragmatic Programmers
Tags: elixir, erlang, beam, community
Published: 2021-11-24 14:53:55

I believe the Elixir community owes a lot to Pragmatic Programmers (also known as PragProg or as [The Pragmatic Bookshelf](https://pragprog.com/)). Let me explain why.

José Valim had the idea of creating Elixir after reading [Bruce Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks](https://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks/) book in 2011. In that book, Bruce wrote a fun introduction to Erlang.

Two years later, PragProg was the first publisher to announce a book on Elixir: Programming Elixir, by Dave Thomas. This is the link to the latest version [https://pragprog.com/titles/elixir16/programming-elixir-1-6/](https://pragprog.com/titles/elixir16/programming-elixir-1-6/). Note that the ebook version is free for those that have emails from Educational Domains!

[Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks](https://pragprog.com/titles/7lang/seven-more-languages-in-seven-weeks/) was published in 2014 and had a chapter on Elixir (and also Lua, another programming language created by Brazilians).   

Speaking of Brazilians, PragProg published several books co-authored by José Valim, the creator of Elixir, and one book by Ulisses Almeida: [Learn Functional Programming with Elixir - New Foundations for a New World](https://pragprog.com/titles/cdc-elixir/learn-functional-programming-with-elixir/).

PragProg must be praised too for having published [Programming Erlang](https://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang2/programming-erlang-2nd-edition/), by the late Joe Armstrong. Without Erlang and the BEAM, Elixir wouldn't be as great as it is.

And if you search for Erlang or Elixir on PragProg's site, you will find dozens of great books written by members of the community. The next one I am going to read is [Testing Elixir - Effective and Robust Testing for Elixir and its Ecosystem](https://pragprog.com/titles/lmelixir/testing-elixir/), by Andrea Leopardi and Jeffrey Matthias.

Right now, as I write this post, the Featured Book on [PragProg's page](https://pragprog.com/) is [Build a Binary Clock with Elixir and Nerves -
Use Layering to Produce Better Embedded Systems
by Frank Hunleth and Bruce A. Tate](https://pragprog.com/titles/thnerves/build-a-binary-clock-with-elixir-and-nerves/). This is part of a new series of shorter books: Pragmatic express.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/freb2bqp4xbg3gzyu2vb.png)
 
Of course, this is good for PragProg too. As you can see in the tweet below, there was a day when "8 of 21 of the best sellers books are Elixir 😃 
on Prag Prog".
{% twitter 1463211707086647307 %}


As you can read in the next tweet, Bruce Tate has passed the torch of Elixir books at PragProg to Sophie DeBenedetto:
{% twitter 1463304834677886984 %}

You can learn more about Bruce and Sophie here:
{% youtube Eb6G4h4OiCs %}.

Finally, do you know [Numerical Elixir (Nx)](https://github.com/elixir-nx)? As far as I know, first [Genetic Algorithms in Elixir - Solve Problems Using Evolution, by Sean Moriarity](https://pragprog.com/titles/smgaelixir/genetic-algorithms-in-elixir/) was published. Then José Valim got in touch with Sean. After a few months, Nx was born! 

So, books can change the ecosystem and impact the community. Read books, write books!