Sorry this thread hasn’t really taken off. I’m surprised because the volume of Ash-related threads and the general interest in this book seems high. Unfortunately my life is very hectic at the moment – my wife has COVID, my daughter has mental health issues, my dog is dying of kidney failure, and my real job responsibilities are growing exponentially. I’m afraid I probably won’t have as much time to devote to shepherding this thread as I had hoped for a while. I do think the book is fantastic and the folks behind Ash are incredibly generous with their time and expertise. Hopefully this thread will organically grow as people go through the book, though perhaps the lack of discussion is actually a testament to how well done it is. If everything in the book is self-explanatory not much room for discussion I guess.

Curious about what writing the book has been like? Rebecca Le’s talk Writing the book on Ash from our recent Elixir Sydney meetup is now available.

You can watch it over here:

I hope everyone’s had a chance to get started on the book. My real life has been very hectic so I haven’t quite finished. I think this is a book most people could get through in 3 days if they had the time to commit to it. Alas, I think we’re all probably pretty busy.

Anyway, just thought I’d share some thoughts on the first chapter. The writing style is clear and personable. Because I so rarely have to do anything with postgres anytime I do a book like this the hardest part is the setup where I have relearn all the database stuff. Other than that the first chapter was pretty effortless.

I really feel like Igniter strikes a great balance of being magical but also printing everything to the terminal so you know what is actually happening. The messages and warnings are very explicit, which is so nice.

The book does a nice job of introducing the concepts of domains and resources, terms which for trained devs are probably obvious but for someone self-taught are a bit opaque. This is clearly wrong, but my intuitive model of Domain:Resources is something like Parent:Sibling classes. So the example Tunez app has a Music domain with resources of Album, Artist, and Track. Everything an instance of an Artist, Album, or Track shares comes from being in the Music domain. While Album, Artist, and Track clearly relate to one another, each also have independent functionality. I wonder if anyone has a more accurate interpretation.

My final takeaway from chapter 1 was just how easy Ash makes the initial setup for a project. It really does exactly as advertised. You get to concentrate on the logic and ideas behind your project while Ash handles a large portion of the implementation. Unlike an agentic tool, however, Ash is not a black box so you can always see how and why it did what it did for you.

Looking forward to hearing everyone else’s experience with the book and Ash in general.