Are there any detailed walkthroughs of complicated Elixir apps?

[AstonJ]

@crispinb

@AstonJ - do you think someone who already has the Elixir basics covered (albeit without having written any serious prod code) would learn much from the Dave Thomas course? The overview makes it look like an intro, but I’m still tempted as I always find Dave Thomas deep & lucid on programming topics.

I’ll write a proper review when I finish it but I would say yes - even if that is to see how someone who has being coding for a long time goes about things. The first version of the course took things to the extreme, and he’s said he’s refined his thoughts and the new course is the result… so I am very keen to see how things have changed. The only thing I wished the original had was some sort of database or persistence - every single app I’ve created has needed a DB so without this aspect this does limit the usefulness, I haven’t checked but I hope this update has one included. Check out the reviews in the thread/s to see whether it’s something you might benefit from (or wait for my review once I’ve finished it)

@LostKobrakai

Lastly I’d suggest to not overestimate what it takes to do elixir in production. When you’re able to create a mix release you’re imo almost done on the elixir/beam specific side. The remaining steps might be reading Erlang in Anger as well as the whole devops/ops part, which can be largely ignorant of the fact that it’s elixir to be run.

Completely agree with this^^

Try not worrying too much about it Jeramy - if it ‘works’ then you’re half way there imo. But if you are worried, just finish those books because once you have you’ll know you’ve got a fairly good grasp of things and you’re heading in the right direction. That’s what I did with my first ever app and that’s what I tend to do myself anyway.

@jeramyRR

I’m not confident enough that I know what I’m doing to deploy it in Production.

Maybe create a small app and then deploy it to a cheap hosting account? Ask questions here if you get stuck?

@crispinb

I guess people learn differently! I have never felt confident about writing production code after reading a book to “grasp the content”.

+

@joey_the_snake

In my experience, books are there to give you a baseline to start from. To obtain serious wisdom you need a combination of experience and mentorship. Re: open source, I don’t think you’ll find (m)any people documenting the entire catalog of wisdom behind the project. The onus is on the interested party to read through the documentation, old issues and PRs and to try submitting a non-trivial PR themselves. You can learn quite a bit about why things were done a certain way by trying to make changes yourself.

Personally I prefer to first read/learn as much as I can so that I have a good overview of a language/framework before getting stuck in. In fact the first app I created was arguably one of my finest… because all the best practices, info, tips and tricks were all fresh in my mind (I definitely got a bit lazy afterwards!)

I wish someone would write an Elixir (or Phoenix) Recipes book - I have referred to the Rails Recipes book often over the years when working with Rails - not because it has info that isn’t anywhere else, but because it’s a lot of ‘good’ reliable info in one place. (Maybe some of our mods or regulars could write such a book )