Do we Need a new Book on Elixir?

IMHO you should write blog articles or alternatively privately held drafts based on your learning experience working through existing materials then once you have reached a intermediate level then go back through your documentation of the things you struggled with and refine them to add clarity and correct mistakes. You can only understand what a beginner feels at the moment in time you are a beginner, so if you have managed to gather a book worthy collection of experience then perhaps make a book or if not perhaps another type of resource. The important thing is to do it as you learn and overcome struggles then refine with hindsight, hindsight alone will get you the same books we have, which are great but won’t capture the things you are struggling with now.

Thank you very much, you have scratched my head.

Will certainly follow with what you say,

Have you seen Joy of Elixir?

Joy of Elixir is a gentle introduction to programming, aimed at people who already know some things about computers, but who have little-to-no programming experience. If you think you don’t know enough about computers, well you got here already and that’s enough!

Maybe something about “Elixir for Pythonista”?
How to float up from classed OOP and Django to actor/functional network & DB programming.

I think ‘Elixir in Action’ is the right book for beginner.

It introduces basic info about Elixir, then jump into concurrent programming which is the core of Erlang/OTP and Elixir.

I think concurrent programming is the beauty of Elixir.

I wanna share my learning path to you.

At the first, I want to write a web application, so I learn:

• basic Elixir by reading Elixir School
• writing traditional MVC application with Programming Phoenix - Part 1
• basic idea of Ecto by reading Programming Ecto - Part 1

After this, I learned something about Phoenix LiveView which can make my website more dynamic.

After gaining an understanding of these high-level usage, I want to go back to the origin. So I plan to read something in depth:

• Elixir in Action (Reading)
• Designing Elixir Systems with OTP

Then, I plan to read something about functional programming:

• Learn Functional Programming with Elixir

Then, I plan to learn more about Erlang/OTP:

• Programming Erlang
• Erlang in Anger

I think, currently, the community provides us a lot of good books. The more important thing is to create great products impressing people.

“Wow, what a good and performant product. Which language do you use?”
“Elixir”

I had the same struggles then you and the book that clicked for me to do the switch to functional programming was:

This book is from @pragdave, also one of the authors of the famous Pagramtic Programmer book

I also love Programming Elixir but it’s for people new to Elixir, not new to programming, and is even advertised as “intermediate to advanced.”

There is no PragProg Elixir that could be on the PragProg “For Beginners” page.

There’s Joy of Elixir, but on its own it’s not enough.

But can’t you start with Python and then come back to Elixir later? Does Elixir need beginners’ materials at all?

I imagine yes, much as Ruby does. Even if early programmers veer off to try out other languages, good beginners’ materials can create attachment and lead to return. And isn’t it possible that functional is one of the better and even easier styles for beginners?

Imagine someone with an idea for a business around a web app. They consider Phoenix. But first they must learn to program in another language with the goal of later throwing much of that away and rebooting in Elixir, whereas their goal isn’t to become a well-rounded programmer (“learn several languages”) but to bring the web app and business they’ve thought of into the world. Their fastest route at that point is a framework in whatever language they’ve learned first and that isn’t Elixir. Maybe they’ll arrive at Elixir later, but they’ll already be somewhat seasoned programmers.

Yet the Dockyard founder for example talks about a lack of junior and intermediate Elixir devs. He stresses that if your business chooses Elixir you can find fantastic senior devs. But junior devs? They skip Elixir. And at least for fledgling devs, some might also say that Elixir skips them.

What book describes in deep how can I move (emulate?) from Pythonic OOP with classes and shared memory to the Erlangish approach?

I found few posts, but don’t see anything usable – it looks like all of them are written by FP-minded people. The problem is computation models differ in their roots.