Book suggestions for Elixir beginners

[tmomy]

I do not know what good books are there

[AstonJ]

Take a look in our book section:

Books

Specifically, these are aimed at beginners:

Joy of Elixir (self-published) (free)

[image] by Ryan Bigg Joy of Elixir came about because I saw that there was not very much when it comes to absolute beginner material for learning Elixir. There's the excellent Getting Started guide on elixir-lang.org and the Programming Elixir book, but those feel like they're more targeted towards experienced programmers. They teach Elixir with a lot of assumed knowledge about programming languages. They're great books, but they're only great books for experienced programmers. Th…

Learn Functional Programming with Elixir (Pragprog)

[image] by Ulisses Almeida Elixir’s straightforward syntax and this guided tour give you a clean, simple path to learn modern functional programming techniques. No previous functional programming experience required! This book walks you through the right concepts at the right pace, as you explore immutable values and explicit data transformation, functions, modules, recursive functions, pattern matching, high-order functions, polymorphism, and failure handling, all while avoiding side effect…

[tmomy]

Thank you！

[frigidcode]

I highly recommend Programming Elixir 1.3 by Dave Thomas. The book covers and/or introduces you to a very large portion of the language. The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook I would avoid, just purchased it and its full of errors and is a bit dated. I’m working through it as its nice practice for debugging / writing OTP apps, but debugging is time consuming and isn’t geared for beginners.

[AstonJ]

@frigidcode

The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook I would avoid, just purchased it and its full of errors and is a bit dated

Is it really? I thought it hadn’t long been finished so I wouldn’t have thought it was too out of date? Which bits in particular?

But yeah I agree with Programming Elixir 1.3 (and Elixir in Action) being a good follow up to the books in my other post

[frigidcode]

Check out the Errata and the Manning forums. Long list of errors and unanswered questions. I worked through the first chapter, and the HTTPoison response wasn’t pattern matched properly so you were operating on the :ok instead of the response body. I pinged Manning on twitter and they said they would email the author, hopefully the epub at least gets updated. I’m going to work through it and document any errors, its still full of great content so I find it valuable to work through.

[peerreynders]

I’d be tempted to push Learn Functional Programming with Elixir forward first. Now granted I’m not familiar with the content - but the outline looks promising and there are a number of excerpts available for review on the table of contents. Being in beta it’s an unfinished product but often that is the time the forum is more active, sometimes giving the opportunity to interact with fellow readers/learners.

The potential benefit that I see is that it immediately focuses on developing the “Elixir mindset” rather than exploring the many other aspects of the Elixir language and ecosystem. Recognizing and adopting that mindset should make anything that follows much easier to deal with. Following it up with Programming Elixir 1.3, one would hopefully be able to breeze through the sequential programming portion to be then exposed to the introductions of concurrent programming, OTP and macros.

As Learn Functional Programming with Elixir is a work in progress it’s probably a good idea to use it at the same time together with another book like Programming Elixir 1.3 - so that you are never waiting for the “next update”.

Now some people prefer Elixir in Action over Programming Elixir but it is bit older so there are some things to watch out for - but it is still good, especially if you prefer its focus on concurrent programming with some OTP (the update will probably be a while, though Manning does have a habit of putting a book into early access once the first three or four chapters are available).

Reading the Hex Elixir documentation in tandem with the material can be a good second perspective (going to have to get used to reading it anyway).