Learning Elixir

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.

Key Features

Explore the functional paradigms of programming with Elixir through use of helpful examples
Concise step-by-step instructions to teach you difficult technical concepts
Bridge the gap between functional programming and Elixir

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

Explore Elixir to create resilient, scalable applications
Create fault-tolerant applications
Become better acquainted with Elixir code and see how it is structured to build and develop functional programs
Learn the basics of functional programming
Gain an understanding of effective OTP principles
Design program-distributed applications and systems
Write and create branching statements in Elixir
Learn to do more with less using Elixir's metaprogramming
Be familiar with the facilities Elixir provides for metaprogramming, macros, and extending the Elixir language

About the Author

Kenny Ballou is a life-long learner, developer, mathematician, and overall thinker. He enjoys solving problems, learning about technologies, and discussing new and different ideas.

He graduated from the Boise State University, majoring in applied mathematics, and minoring in computer science. He has been programming professionally for nearly a decade, and is currently working as a software developer for an analytics company in the Boise, Idaho area.

Apart from developing professionally, he is active in the open source community, contributing where he can.

When he is not developing, he enjoys reading, learning, and shredding the local mountains.

You can read more from him on his blog at https://kennyballou.com, check out his code on GitHub at https://github.com/kennyballou/, and follow him on Twitter at @kennyballou.

Table of Contents

Introducing Elixir – Thinking Functionally
Elixir Basics – Foundational Steps toward Functional Programming
Modules and Functions – Creating Functional Building Blocks
Collections and Stream Processing
Control Flow – Occasionally You Need to Branch
Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency
OTP – A Poor Name for a Rich Framework
Distributed Elixir – Taking Concurrency to the Next Node
Metaprogramming – Doing More with Less